Optimizing Energy Efficient Mobile Computing: Explicit Data Communication and Power Management Tool

For manufacturers of microelectronic systems such as smart phones, tablets, and other mobile computing devices and for SoC (system-on-a-chip) designers, manufacturers, and vendors, system power consumption represents a major consideration. SoC designers must optimize power within SoC units, such as CPUs, graphic controllers, display controllers and memory controllers. However, on modern mobile platforms most energy is consumed by data moving between CPUs and memory and display controllers. Researchers at Arizona State University’s Center for Embedded Systems (CES) have been working to make SoC architecture and systems more power efficient. This breakthrough work led to the development of a tool that better analyzes power consumption of mobile applications within each unit so as to optimize SoC power efficiency by separating data movement and computation power.