Low-power design for real-time systems

This paper represents one of few attempts to address the issue of low power design for real-time systems. We present a power reduction method at the software compilation level. Given a real-time program, an inter-instruction power reduction technique is proposed to transform the program to another one with lower power consumption. In addition, a scheduling algorithm for realtime operating systems is proposed [1] to reschedule realtime programs when the execution time of the programs is changed. Therefore, the proposed scheduling algorithm works together with the proposed power reduction technique to make sure all programs meet their deadlines and to improve the system schedulability. We also evaluate the performance of the proposed inter-instruction reduction method by comparing it with the cold scheduling algorithm and show that the proposed method outperforms the cold scheduling algorithm and reduces more energy power.