Embedded systems are everywhere, from mobile phones to medical devices. They are becoming more complex, and have to fulfill competing requirements, in terms of performance (timing constraints), reliability and energy consumption (long battery life). Due to the competing constraints, their design is becoming increasingly difficult. In this thesis we consider hard real-time applications mapped on...

The sensor network design approach normally considers the communication energy consumption for evaluating a communication protocol. This is true for the low power devices such as MICAz/MICA2 which do not consume a lot of energy for the data treatment. However, recently developed sensor devices for multimedia applications such as iMote2 do consume considerable amount of energy for data processin...

We consider an N×N input-queued switch with a crossbarbased switching fabric implemented on a single chip. The power consumption produced by the crossbar chip and due to the data transfer grows as NR, where R is the maximum bit rate. Thus, at increasing bit rate, power dissipation is becoming more and more challenging, limiting the crossbar scalability for high performance switches. We propose ...

Real-time 3D graphics have been widely adopted on handheld devices such as cellular phones and PDAs with high performance processors consuming only limited power [1-3]. Recently, a vertex shader of 120Mvertices/s and 106mW at 60fps was presented [3], but it consumed a large silicon area of 1.5M transistors to integrate 16 floating-point multipliers for the fast matrix multiplications required. ...

In an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), the amount of resources allocated to a virtual machine (VM) at creation time may be expressed with relative values (relative to the hardware, i.e., a fraction of the capacity of a device) or absolute values (i.e., a performancemetric which is independent from the capacity of the hardware). Surprisingly, disk or network resource allocations are expressed...

The steady downsizing of semiconductor technology nodes in recent years has led to a rapid increase the density power consumption on chips which, turn, renders temperature major issue for many-core systems, adversely affecting their performance, reliability, leakage, cost, etc. In this context, task migration is powerful technique that widely used controlling temperature profile s...

In order to develop a low-power and highperformance SoC platform for multimedia applications, the Parallel Architecture Core (PAC) project was initiated in Taiwan in 2003. AVLIW digital signal processor (PACDSP) has been developed from a proprietary instruction set with multimedia-rich instructions, a complexity-effective microarchitecture with an innovative distributed & ping-pong register org...

Asymmetric multicore systems had been studied as a new hardware platform toward performance-power efficiency for the execution of application programs. Each core in the system has distinct performance and power characteristics. When exploiting asymmetric multicore systems, a major issue is to distribute threads to various cores. In this work, we build a pseudo asymmetric system by the dynamic v...

Driver circuits that save switching power by 25 % or more using LC resonance energy recovery are shown for use in clock and data networks. Resonant and other energy savings circuits are shown from global to local leaf cell clocking. A 109 operating frequency range with power reductions allows dynamic voltage and frequency scaling for power management. The resonance used only for the brief trans...

As power consumption being the first order constraint to build microprocessors, they are required to achieve high performance within the strictly limited power budget. For example, capping the peak power consumption is a strongly desired feature in large scale data centers or massive HPC machines. Future many-core processors are expected to host a variety of workloads which have different chara...