Skip to main content
EURASIP Journal on Embedded Systems
Download PDF
  • Research Article
  • Open access
  • Published:

Observations on Power-Efficiency Trends in Mobile Communication Devices

EURASIP Journal on Embedded Systems volume 2007, Article number: 056976 (2007) Cite this article

Abstract

Computing solutions used in mobile communications equipment are similar to those in personal and mainframe computers. The key differences between the implementations at chip level are the low leakage silicon technology and lower clock frequency used in mobile devices. The hardware and software architectures, including the operating system principles, are strikingly similar, although the mobile computing systems tend to rely more on hardware accelerators. As the performance expectations of mobile devices are increasing towards the personal computer level and beyond, power efficiency is becoming a major bottleneck. So far, the improvements of the silicon processes in mobile phones have been exploited by software designers to increase functionality and to cut development time, while usage times, and energy efficiency, have been kept at levels that satisfy the customers. Here we explain some of the observed developments and consider means of improving energy efficiency. We show that both processor and software architectures have a big impact on power consumption. Properly targeted research is needed to find the means to explicitly optimize system designs for energy efficiency, rather than maximize the nominal throughputs of the processor cores used.

[1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22]

References

  1. GSM Association : TW.09 Battery Life Measurement Technique. 1998.http://www.gsmworld.com/documents/index.shtml

    Google Scholar 

  2. Nokia : Phone models. http://www.nokia.com/

  3. Anis M, Allam M, Elmasry M: Impact of technology scaling on CMOS logic styles. IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems II: Analog and Digital Signal Processing 2002,49(8):577-588. 10.1109/TCSII.2002.805631

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Frantz G: Digital signal processor trends. IEEE Micro 2000,20(6):52-59. 10.1109/40.888703

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. The ARM foundry program, 2004 and 2006, http://www.arm.com/

  6. 3GPP: TS 05.01 : Physical Layer on the Radio Path (General Description). http://www.3gpp.org/ftp/Specs/html-info/0501.htm

  7. Doyle J, Broach B: Small gains in power efficiency now, bigger gains tomorrow. EE Times 2002.

    Google Scholar 

  8. Jyrkkä K, Silven O, Ali-Yrkkö O, Heidari R, Berg H: Component-based development of DSP software for mobile communication terminals. Microprocessors and Microsystems 2002,26(9-10):463-474. 10.1016/S0141-9331(02)00077-7

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Neuvo Y: Cellular phones as embedded systems. Proceedings of IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC '04), February 2004, San Francisco, Calif, USA 1: 32-37.

    Google Scholar 

  10. Gao XQ, Duanmu CJ, Zou CR: A multilevel successive elimination algorithm for block matching motion estimation. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing 2000,9(3):501-504. 10.1109/83.826786

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Wang H-S, Mersereau RM: Fast algorithms for the estimation of motion vectors. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing 1999,8(3):435-438. 10.1109/83.748899

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. 5250 VGA encoder, 2004, http://www.hantro.com/en/products/codecs/hardware/5250.html

  13. Moch S, Bereković M, Stolberg HJ, et al.: HIBRID-SOC: a multi-core architecture for image and video applications. ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News 2004,32(3):55-61. 10.1145/1024295.1024303

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Loo KK, Alukaidey T, Jimaa SA: High performance parallelised 3GPP turbo decoder. Proceedings of the 5th European Personal Mobile Communications Conference (EPMCC '03), April 2003, Glasgow, UK, Conf. Publ. no. 492 337-342.

    Google Scholar 

  15. Salami R, Laflamme C, Bessette B, et al.: Description of GSM enhanced full rate speech codec. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC '97), June 1997, Montreal, Canada 2: 725-729.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Klein MH: A Practitioner's Handbook for Real-Time Analysis. Kluwer, Boston, Mass, USA; 1993.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  17. Spuri M, Buttazzo GC: Efficient aperiodic service under earliest deadline scheduling. Proceedings of Real-Time Systems Symposium, December 1994, San Juan, Puerto Rico, USA 2-11.

    Google Scholar 

  18. Stärner J, Asplund L: Measuring the cache interference cost in preemptive real-time systems. Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Languages, Compilers, and Tools for Embedded Systems (LCTES '04), June 2004, Washington, DC, USA 146-154.

    Google Scholar 

  19. Gathaus MR, Ringenberg JS, Ernst D, Austen TM, Mudge T, Brown RB: MiBench: a free, commercially representative embedded benchmark suite. Proceedings of the 4th Annual IEEE International Workshop on Workload Characterization (WWC-4 '01), December 2001, Austin, Tex, USA 3-14.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  20. Mogul JC, Borg A: The effect of context switches on cache performance. Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS '91), April 1991, Santa Clara, Calif, USA 75-84.

    Google Scholar 

  21. Sebek F: Instruction cache memory issues in real-time systems, Technology Licentiate thesis.

  22. Sriram S, Bhattacharyya SS: Embedded Multiprocessors: Scheduling and Synchronization. Marcel Dekker, New York, NY, USA; 2000.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Information Engineering, University of Oulu, P.O. Box 4500, Linnanmaa, 90014, Finland

    Olli Silven

  2. Technology Platforms, Nokia Corporation, Elektroniikkatie 3, Oulu, 90570, Finland

    Kari Jyrkkä

Authors
  1. Olli Silven
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Kari Jyrkkä
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Olli Silven.

Rights and permissions

Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Silven, O., Jyrkkä, K. Observations on Power-Efficiency Trends in Mobile Communication Devices. J Embedded Systems 2007, 056976 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1155/2007/56976

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1155/2007/56976

Keywords