Low-energy directed architecture selection and task scheduling for system-level design

Most of the current methods for designing power/energy efficient digital systems are addressing either the system hardware or system software. This is usually performed quite late in the design process. This paper presents a method for minimizing the energy consumption at system level, early in the design process. Our approach to low-energy system design uses constraint programing to achieve this goal. Considering a system composed of several communicating tasks running on a multiprocessor architecture, our method tries to find for a given deadline, the best schedule and configuration of processors from the energy consumption point of view. Finally, we present a set of experiments which confirm the importance of addressing the energy consumption at system level.