Metric Based Multi-Timescale Control for Reducing Power in Embedded Systems

Abstract--Digital control for embedded systems often requires low-power, hard real-time computation to satisfy high control-loop bandwidth, low latency, and low-power requirements. In particular, the emerging applications of Micro ElectroMechanical Systems (MEMS) sensors, and their increasing integration, presents a challenging requirement to embed ultralow power digital control architectures for these lithographically formed micro-structures. Controlling electromechanical structures of such a small scale, using naive digital controllers, can be prohibitively expensive (both in power and cost for portable or battery operated applications.) In this paper, we describe the potential for control systems to be transformed into a set of cooperating parallel linear systems and demonstrate, for the first time, that this parallelization can reduce the total number of instructions executed, thereby reducing power, at the expense of controlled loss in control fidelity. Since the error tolerance o...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: VLSID
• Authors: Forrest Brewer, João Pedro Hespanha, Nitin Kataria, Timothy Sherwood
• Keywords: Computer Aided Design, Control Fidelity, Feedback Control Systems, Power Digital Control, VLSID 2009