An Energy-Aware Synthesis Methodology for OS-Driven Multi-Process Embedded Software

The growing software content in various battery-driven embedded systems has led to significant interest in technologies for energy-efficient embedded software. While lowenergy software research has, in the past, focused on energy optimization at the instruction and source-code levels, approaches targeted at a higher software level are beginning to gain attention. In this work, we propose a methodology to refine a control-data flow diagram (CDFD) model of an embedded software program into an energy-efficient multi-process software architecture graph (SAG). Our starting representation, the CDFD, is capable of modeling data-dependent control flow. Energy efficiency is achieved by reducing the energy wastage due to context switches and inter-process communications (IPCs). Conditionally-unused computational operations, and their corresponding energy, are also avoided by a condition-aware static scheduler. Finally, code generation is performed from the energy-efficient SAG to produce a multi-process program that implements the original CDFD specification. Experimental results establish the efficacy of the proposed approach.