EFFICIENT ENERGY CONSUMPTION IN THE DEDICATED EMBEDDED SYSTEMS
ROTAR DAN 1*, CULEA GEORGE 1, ANDRIOAIA DRAGOȘ 1 1. Vasile Alecsandri University of Bacău, Calea Mărăşeşti 156, Bacău, 600115, Romania
*Corresponding author, e-mail drotar@ub.ro
Reducing the energy consumption in all fields is currently a continuing concern. Worldwide it has formed a number of entities that seek to encourage the achievement of environmentally friendly electronic products, from several points of view. Given the continued growth of the volume of electronic systems currently used and the planned spectacular expansion in the period ahead, reducing the electricity consumption of the electronic devices and equipment’s is a serious concern in the design of electronic systems. The paper shows how an embedded system used in industrial automation and equipped with a series of energy-saving mechanisms is designed and implemented. For the physical realization of the project a programmable logic array was used because of the flexibility that it offers in the design and implementation of such systems. The mechanisms for energy saving are: power control of the various functional blocks of the embedded system control and the command frequency control of the digital circuits. With an innovative design and a proper control, the embedded functional blocks of the system are placed in the active state or in hibernation, as needed, in order to reduce the electricity consumption. Also, due to the digital character of the component modules it is possible to control the energy consumption by controlling the command frequency of these modules. In this way the modules operate at a variable command frequency, at a high value of the frequency when it increases their request and at a low frequency corresponding to the decrease of the module load. The regime used in order to improve the energy consumption lowers the amount of energy consumed and decreases the temperature and increases the life of the system components. Getting results is done on the one hand in the design phase and on the other hand in the operating of the embedded system. In the design phase, several variants of solving a problem are made available and the designer chooses the most convenient one. In the operational phase the power of the modules and their frequency are controlled. The obtained embedded system is designed to a specific application (dedicated system) for which it was designed, thereby obtaining a maximum desired effect.
