Guest editorial

In the past decade, energy-awareness has become a first-class requirement of efficient real-time systems. Real-time researchers have contributed significantly to the development of such systems, with particular focus on maintaining real-time system properties including hard and soft task deadlines, reliability, and time-based servicelevel objectives. Power awareness and energy efficiency are not only beneficial for increasing the lifetime of embedded systems, but they can also help the handling and energy-efficient scheduling of devices attached to such systems. This special issue on “Energy-Aware Real-time Systems” presents the state-of-the-art in the area of energy and power management in real-time computing systems. This collection of papers develops instrumental techniques for designing and implementing energy-efficient real-time systems. As the current generation of transistors nears the atomic limits of gate size, the role of software designers becomes evermore integral to managing the limited power supply available to computing devices. The goal is to develop and assemble an array of energy-conserving techniques aimed at utilizing every working cycle of a component’s time toward completing a task; else, the component is sent to a low-power or no-power state until it is needed. The best