Designing platform-based system power management on a smart tablet appliance

For the design of portable systems, power consumption is as important a design criterion as performance. Low power design starts at the system level and a top down approach will yield the greatest results. Previous researches only address on partial stages of platform-based power management. Hence, in this paper, we consider the low power design on the whole system to explore the methodology and implementation from the circuit design stage including selection of key components, analysis of hardware architecture and the platform design to dynamic power management on battery management techniques, operating systems and software design for various Hardware/Software co-design issues. We will take the tablet appliances platform as an example to illustrate how to design the power management system of the handheld device of medium to large sizes, and how to implement the advanced software power management mechanism on embedded OS like Microsoft Windows CE.NET.