VLSI systems energy management from a software perspective – A literature survey

SummaryThe increasing demand for ultra-low power electronic systems has motivated research in device technology and hardware design techniques. Experimental studies have proved that the hardware innovations for power reduction are fully exploited only with the proper design of upper layer software. Also, the software power and energy modelling and analysis – the first step towards energy reduction is complex due to the inter and intra dependencies of processors, operating systems, application software, programming languages and compilers. The subject is too vast; the paper aims to give a consolidated view to researchers in arriving at solutions to power optimization problems from a software perspective. The review emphasizes the fact that software design and implementation is to be viewed from system energy conservation angle rather than as an isolated process. After covering a global view of end to end software based power reduction techniques for micro sensor nodes to High Performance Computing systems, specific design aspects related to battery powered Embedded computing for mobile and portable systems are addressed in detail. The findings are consolidated into 2 major categories – those related to research directions and those related to existing industry practices. The emerging concept of Green Software with specific focus on mainframe computing is also discussed in brief. Empirical results on power saving are included wherever available. The paper concludes that only with the close co-ordination between hardware architect, software architect and system architect low energy systems can be realized