Low-power driven scheduling and binding

We investigate the problem of exploiting signal correlation between operations to find a schedule and binding which minimizes switching. We propose several heuristics to solve the problem. Experimentally, we give an algorithm for scheduling communications on a bus, which reduces bus switching up to 60%, without increasing the number of cycles required for the schedule. Low-power scheduling efforts in the literature have focused on decreasing the number of cycles in the schedule so that the voltage required to run the resulting circuit can be lowered. However, the number of voltages supplied to a chip is likely to be limited, so among the processes to be implemented, typically only a few will determine the minimum voltages, and the rest will have slack in their schedules. Therefore it is interesting to inquire about the impact of scheduling which does not reduce the number of time steps in order to decrease switching. In this paper, we show that power-aware scheduling can lead to significant decreases in switching, often without an increase in the number of time steps required. The technique is general, and can be used to schedule operations on any kind of resources.