Cooperative voltage scaling (CVS) between OS and applications for low-power real-time systems

Power efficient design of real-time embedded systems based on programmable processors becomes more important as system functionality is increasingly realized through software. This paper presents a cooperative power optimization method among OS, applications, and hardware platform. The hardware platform that consists of off-the-shelf microprocessor and custom-designed LSI is designed to support power-down and discrete levels of frequencies and voltages. In order to exploit these features, cooperative voltage scaling method is proposed, which is realized through design of power conscious OS and development of applications with concept of application slicing.