Design rule for frequency-voltage cooperative power control and its application to an MPEG-4 decoder

Abstract

Frequency-voltage cooperative power control (FVC) is considered a powerful method to reduce the power consumption of a program, because it utilizes the information of software loads dynamically. The authors first show through a mathematical analysis that FVC with only two frequency-voltage sets is sufficient for current low-Vdd CPU chips. Then we show an experimental result that FVC feedback control on an MPEG-4 video decoder can reduce the power to one-fourth.