Low Power Mobile Operating Systems with Profiling Hardware Acceleration

Vol.5 No.3

Year: 2011

Issue: Jan-Mar                                  

Title: Low Power Mobile Operating Systems with Profiling Hardware Acceleration   

Author Name: Xinwei Niu, Narueporn Nartasilpa , Chayapol Chaiyanan , Jeffrey Fan   

Synopsis:   

In this paper, a System-on-a-Chip (SoC) based hardware acceleration solution for low power mobile operating systems is proposed. In mobile communication systems, it is very costly to transform the entire software application into a hardware solution. However, some applications may have such a need due to their high performance and low power requirements. These software systems consist of several kinds of functions and some of these functions will be invoked at a very high frequency. The speed and energy consumptions are two major concerns for modern system development, thus it is important for designers to balance the tradeoff between these two factors. If the system can process very high-speed operations and consume less energy, it is an efficient design. The basic idea of this paper is to only transform those highly used functions into hardware by using the proposed profiling and hardware acceleration methodology. The solution that this paper will demonstrate is to convert the system into a cost effective hardware-software co-design. Experimental results show that with the proposed profiling method and hardware acceleration platform, mobile operating systems could solve the same problem within shorter period of time (4.3 times speedup) and lower energy consumption (around 76% reduction).