Low-energy intra-task voltage scheduling using static timing analysis

We propose an intra-task voltage scheduling algorithm for low-energy hard real-time applications. Based on a static timing analysis technique, the proposed algorithm controls the supply voltage within an individual task boundary. By fully exploiting all the slack times, a scheduled program by the proposed algorithm always complete its execution near the deadline, thus achieving a high energy reduction ratio. In order to validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, we built a software tool that automatically converts a DVS-unaware program into an equivalent low-energy program. Experimental results show that the low-energy version of an MPEG-4 encoder/decoder (converted by the software tool) consumes less than 7∼25% of the original program running on a fixed-voltage system with a power-down mode.