Title
An asymmetric dual-processor architecture for low-power information appliances
Abstract
As users become increasingly conscious of their energy footprint—either to improve battery life or to respect the environment—improved energy efficiency of systems has gained in importance. This is especially important in the context of information appliances such as e-book readers that are meant to replace books, since their energy efficiency impacts how long the appliance can be used on a single charge of the battery. In this article, we present a new software and hardware architecture for information appliances that provides significant advantages in terms of device lifetime. The architecture combines a low-power microcontroller with a high-performance application processor, where the low-power microcontroller is used to handle simple user interactions (e.g., turning pages, inking, entering text) without waking up the main application processor. We demonstrate how this architecture is easily adapted to the traditional way of building user interfaces using a user interface markup language. We report on our initial measurements using an E Ink-based prototype. When comparing our hybrid architecture to a simpler solution we found that we can increase the battery life by a factor of 1.72 for a reading task and by a factor of 3.23 for a writing task. We conclude by presenting design guidelines aimed at optimizing the overall energy signature of information appliances.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1145/2560538
ACM Trans. Embedded Comput. Syst.
Keywords
Field
DocType
battery life,simple user interaction,information appliance,hybrid architecture,low-power microcontroller,low-power information appliance,overall energy signature,hardware architecture,energy footprint,asymmetric dual-processor architecture,improved energy efficiency,energy efficiency impact,interface design,human computer interface
Efficient energy use,Computer science,User interface markup language,Software,Microcontroller,User interface,Computer hardware,Energy consumption,Microarchitecture,Hardware architecture,Embedded system
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
13
Issue-in-Progress
1539-9087
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
4
0.44
18
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
François Guimbretiére11269.04
Shenwei Liu2282.01
Han Wang340.44
Rajit Manohar4103896.72