Power optimization in disk-based real-time application specific systems

A flurry of modern communications, video, and DSP applications, such as world wide web, interactive high resolution television, video-on-demand, video conferencing, and wireless communications, are mainly data management oriented. In this type of systems, magnetic disk performance is quickly becoming a primary bottleneck which dictates key design metrics of the overall system. At the same time, technology trends imply reduced importance of classical design objectives, such as area and throughput, and together with consumers demand for portability promote power consumption as the principal design metric. While numerous power optimization techniques have been proposed at all levels of design process abstractions for electronic components, until now, power minimization in mixed mechanical-electronic subsystems, such as disks, has not been addressed. We first analyze optimization degrees of freedom for power minimization in disk-based application specific systems. Next, we propose a concep...