Overview

Low-power consumption is one of the crucial factors determining the success of modern, portable and non-portable electronic devices. Mobile computing systems and biomedical implantable devices are just a few examples of electronic devices whose power consumption is a basic constraint to be met, since their operativity in the time domain depends on a limited energy storage.

However, extended battery life is not the only motivation for low power consumption. Due to the increasing integration density and the scaling up of operating frequencies, the overheating produced by power consumption is becoming one of the most important factors determining the duration of the electronic components of the system. Such excessive heating must be reduced by mechanical intervention (cooling) or advanced packaging solutions, affecting another important factor for the success of a product: the overall system cost.

Modern low power electronic devices are also quite often characterized by tight performance constraints. This trend is currently motivated by the demand for mobile, micro-processor based computing devices running medium or high-end software applications. Among these we can find multimedia devices, such as streaming video encoding and decoding appliances, for which the throughput constraint is strictly dependent on the relative power consumption of the device.

In this context, the designer's intervention is essential for taking high-level architectural decisions and providing creative solutions, while the design synthesis, the efficiency and the quality of the overall process is carried out by a set of automatic Computer Aided Design (CAD) tools for power estimation and optimization. In fact,...