最小のエネルギーでプロセッサを稼働させる電圧制御システム
A Voltage Scaling System Enabling Minimum Energy Operation of Processors

概要

With the rapid development of electronic devices ranging from computing servers in data center to IoT devices, energy-efficient electronic devices are highly required. This work presents a runtime voltage scaling system that minimizes the energy consumption of processors embedded into the devices. Scaling the supply and threshold voltages of processors is an effective technique to reduce their energy consumption. However, the problem is that their performance also degrades at the low voltage operation, which leads to the timing violation of the application deadline. With the aid of monitoring circuits embedded into processors, the proposed system dynamically optimizes the two voltages depending on the processors' workloads so that the energy consumption is minimized without violating the deadline. A prototype voltage scaling system is presented in this work.

産業界への展開例・適用分野

By introducing the proposed voltage scaling system, up to 76.5% energy reduction in the LSI circuits can be achieved in comparison with the case where no voltage scaling techniques are applied. LSI circuits are key devices in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Therefore, the proposed technique can be applied to various application examples such as a high-performance computing region, a mobile computing region, and a sensor-based computing region. Since the proposed voltage scaling system is implemented in software, the system can be flexibly implemented into various devices such as IoT devices and general purpose processors on which Operating Systems (OSes) can run.

研究者

氏名	専攻	研究室	役職/学年
Liu Shengyu	通信情報システム専攻	小野寺研究室	修士2回生
Shiomi Jun	通信情報システム専攻	小野寺研究室	助教
Ishihara Tohru	通信情報システム専攻	小野寺研究室	准教授
Onodera Hidetoshi	通信情報システム専攻	小野寺研究室	教授

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