Guest Editors’ Introduction: Design and Management of Mobile Platforms: From Smartphones to Wearable Devices

There are close to five million apps that run on more than a billion smartphones as of 2020 [1]. This number is likely to continue increasing rapidly with the technological advancements in mobile computing, smaller form-factor wearable computers, and the Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. Although form factors and specific system requirements vary, mobile platforms share common design goals, which include energy-efficiency, competitive performance, battery life, and reliability. Competitive performance requires faster operating frequency and leads to higher power consumption. In turn, power consumption increases the junction and skin temperatures, which have adverse effects on the device reliability and user experience. Therefore, highly heterogeneous systems-on-chips (SoCs) are required to achieve the performance requirements in terms of tight power consumption, energy, and cost. The design of these platforms remains challenging. Moreover, application development, let alone aggressive optimization, is notoriously difficult and time-consuming when utilizing highly specialized accelerators. The optimization problem is exacerbated by dynamic variations of application workloads and operating conditions. As a result, there is a need for novel software- and hardware-based adaptive resource management approaches that consider the platform as a whole, rather than focusing on a subset of the target system.