Energy-And Area-Efficient Architectures Through Application Clustering and Architectural Heterogeneity

Customizing architectures for particular applications is a promising approach to yield highly energy-efficient designs for embedded systems. This paper explores the benefits of architectural customization for a class of embedded architectures typically used in energy- and area-constrained application domains, such as sensor nodes and multimedia processing. The authors implement a process flow that performs an automatic synthesis and evaluation of the different architectures based on run-time profiles of applications and determines an efficient architecture, with consideration for both energy and area constraints.