Dynamic Power Management of Electronic Systems

heterogenous components that may be active at different times. In other words, component activity is event-driven. A simple, yet effective approach to reduce the power dissipated by the system consists of disabling (or reducing the performance of) the components when they are inactive (or partially unexploited). Dynamic power management (DPM) is a design methodology that allows power-down (or slow-down) of system components to provide requested services and performance levels with minimum power consumption. A component of an event-driven computing system can be modeled through a finite state machine that, in the simplest case, has two states: active and idle. When the component is idle, it can be shut down by lowering its power supply or by turning off its clock; this can drastically reduce power dissipation.