Low-power scheduling with resources operating at multiple voltages

This paper presents a resource-constrained scheduling scheme and a latency-constrained scheduling scheme that minimize power consumption for the case when the resources operate at multiple voltages. The resource-constrained scheduling reduces the power consumption by maximally utilizing resources operating at reduced voltages and, at the same time, reducing the latency. The latency-constrained scheduling scheme reduces the power consumption by assigning as many nodes (of the data flow graph) as possible to the resources operating at reduced voltages. Both schemes consider the effect of switching activity on the power consumption of the functional units. In addition, both schemes use heuristics to reduce the power consumed by the level shifters. Experiments with HLS benchmark examples show that the proposed schemes achieve significant power reduction when the operating voltages are 5 and 3.3 V or 5, 3.3, and 2.4 V.