An Efficient Approach to Energy Saving in Microcontrollers

Although energy saving has increasing importance for energy-limited microcontrollers, low power and high control performance are at odds with each other. This paper presents a simple yet efficient dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) scheme that targets reducing CPU energy consumption while meeting control requirements. With focus on two typical kinds of sources of workload variability, it explores a combination of time-triggered and event-triggered mechanisms. Simulations are carried out to highlight the merits of the proposed approach. It is argued that in comparion with traditional DVS scheme, it saves considerably more energy while providing comparable control performance.