DR. NAEHYUCK CHANG

LOW-POWER DESIGN FROM EMBEDDED COMPUTING TO CYBER-PHYSICAL SYSTEMS

Power consumption became one of the most critical limiting factors in modern electronics systems design from Internet of Things to high-performance computing systems as the device and circuit techniques are being matured. By contrast, systemlevel low-power design avoids inefficient use of devices and circuits by exploiting the application characteristics and user behaviors. As a result, it provides opportunities to further reduce the total system power consumption beyond the limit of the devices and circuits. Recently, it has been shown that low-power electronics design methodologies can also efficiently reduce power consumption of physical world, that is, power-aware CPS (cyber-physical systems) design extends the scope of lowpower design of electronics systems to physical worlds such as vehicle drive-train, building HVAC (heat, ventilation and air conditioning), power grid (generation, transmission and distribution), etc. Introducing several breakthroughs in cross-layer low-power design that we have developed, this talk demonstrates how we extend the scope of system-level low-power design from embedded computing systems to CPS. In general, physical worlds’ power consumption is orders of magnitude higher than that of cyber worlds, and thus low-power CPS indeed achieves holistic power saving. More specifically, we introduce our targets of low-power design ranging from CPU, memory and interconnects to energy harvesting, energy storage, electric vehicles and drones. This talk will inspire the current and future low-power CPS with an emphasis on physical worlds within the framework of Design Automation of Things.