Power-Aware Compilation for Embedded Processors with Dynamic Voltage Scaling and Adaptive Body Biasing Capabilities

Traditionally, active power has been the primary source of power dissipation in CMOS designs. Although, leakage power is becoming increasingly more important as technology feature sizes continue to shrink, traditioinal power optimization techniques often neglect its contribution to total system power. In this paper, we present a power-aware compilation methodology that targets an embedded processor with both dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) and adaptive body biasing (ABB) capabilities. Our technique has the unique advantage of optimizing design power by jointly optimizing dynamic and leakage power dissipation. Considering the delay and energy penalty of swithching between processor modes, our compiler generates code with minimum power consumption under deadline constraints. Compared to not performing any optimization, or using DVS alone, our technique improves the power consumption of a number of embedded application kernels by 26%, and 14%, respectively. 1