System-level power optimization: techniques and tools

This tutorial presents a cohesive view of power-conscious system-level design. We consider systems as consisting of a hardware platform executing software programs. We address the problems of power estimation and minimization for such systems. We consider the major constituents of systems: processors, memories and communication resources. We analyze power dissipation in these components and we survey computer-aided power reduction techniques. We also consider global system-level control schemes, such as dynamic power management. We conclude by pointing out further research problems which are still open in this domain.