Functional redundancy for dynamic exploitation of performance-energy consumption trade-offs

This paper presents a novel approach for system design, the functional redundancy, as one way to allow dynamic exchange of system's characteristics, in order to obtain the lowest power consumption still meeting performance requirements. The basic idea is to have different implementation instances of circuits with the same functionality but with different performance-energy consumption characteristics. An RTOS aware of the functional redundancy present in the circuit will make the dispatch of instructions to the highest performance or to the lowest power consuming IP core, according to the system load. We extend the task model for real-time scheduling and demonstrate the effectiveness of the method through some experiments.