EHS: Adaptive, Power-Efficient Processors for Sensors and Embedded Systems

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Margaret Martonosi, Princeton University, Adaptive, Power-Efficeint Processors for Sensors and Embedded Systems Sensor network systems have seen increasing research attention recently, with a wide range of scientific and commercial applications. Sensor processors need "agile" performance that responds quickly to high-throughput bursts, with also lower-energy execution whenpossible to minimize energy consumption. Sensor systems have limited power budgets, with traditionally most energy going to radio communications. But as radios improve and computationaldemands increase, more of the energy budget is shifting backto the processor.This research examines processor architectures for agile,energy-efficient, stream-based processing in sensor networksand other embedded systems. A particular focus is on usingparallelism (through tiled processing units) for energy management.Another key aspect is investigating the interconnect between on-chipprocessing units, and exploring design techniques that let differentprocessing elements run at different clock rates. Connecting processing elements by a system of hardware queues, for example, allows the chip to exploit a thread-based, producer-consumer model to adapt processor settingsto running threads; this enables efficient energy and speed controlvia dynamic voltage/frequency scaling. By exposingqueue/memory status to near neighbors, processors can usecontrol theoretic approaches to coordinate performance/energyneeds across local and broader regions. Major research questions include: (i) How much on-chip parallelismbest balances application performance and energy? (ii) What range of applications are applicable to this model? (iii) How to design performance andpower-efficient speed-control models based on local and globalcontrol approaches? (iv) What are the roles of distributed andhierarchical control techniques? (v) Can control theoreticapproaches be devised that offer good responsiveness and stabilityin the face of sensing errors and sensing/actuation delays?