A survey of design techniques for system-level dynamic power management

Dynamic power management (DPM) is a design methodology for dynamically reco nfiguring systems to provide the requested services and performance levels with a minimum number of active components or a minimum load on such compon ents. DPM encompasses a set of techniques that achieves energy-efficient co mputation by selectively turning off (or reducing the performance of) syste m components when they are idle (or partially unexploited). In this paper, we survey several approaches to system-level dynamic power m anagement. We first describe how systems employ power-manageable components and how the use of dynamic reconfiguration call impact the overall power c onsumption. We then analyze DPM implementation issues in electronic systems , and we survey recent initiatives in standardizing the hardware/software i nterface to enable software-controlled power management of hardware compone nts.