Designing Greener Real Time Controllers

Most modern devices contain embedded processors which all contribute to power usage. In order to reduce this power consumption and make a product greener it is essential to have design processes that help the designer choose lower power processors. This paper outlines a process for designing real time control systems where a key problem is that lower power processors have more delays and timing jitter. A novel simulation method allows the designer to predict the effects of these defects and thus choose a lower power, lower performance controller which will still be adequate for the control task at hand. A simple thermal control application is used to demonstrate the proposed method.