A generalized technique for energy-efficient operating voltage set-up in dynamic voltage scaled processors

Dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) which is an effective energy minimization technique has been well-studied in recent years. Yet the problem of selecting voltage levels for multiple voltage DVS systems remains an unresolved issue. In this paper, we present a novel technique for dealing with the problem of finding k operating voltages to minimize the energy consumption (voltage set-up problem). A new formulation of the voltage set-up problem is given to make our solution less dependent on the specific DVS scheme. Then it is solved optimally using dynamic programming in polynomial time. With almost the same time complexity we extend the proposed technique to explore the design space to determine the best number of voltage levels. It is confirmed from the experiments that the proposed voltage set-up solution reduces energy consumption by 19.2% on average over that of previous technique (Buss et al., 2003).