Low-power buffer management using hybrid control

The power management problem is studied for a pipeline of streaming data consisting of multiple stages with buffer memories inserted between adjacent stages. The objective is to find the optimal strategy for dynamically changing the power states of the stages so that the power consumption of the overall system is minimized. By modeling the pipeline as a hybrid system, we derive various necessary conditions for the optimal solutions. In particular, an operation called folding is introduced that can improve the performance of an existing strategy. Analytic conditions are derived for determining whether folding can save power and the optimal number of folds.