skip to main content
10.1145/2333660.2333687acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesislpedConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Power conversion efficiency characterization and optimization for smartphones

Published: 30 July 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Modern smartphones consume significant power and can hardly provide a full day's use between charging operations even with a 2000 mAh battery. This is in spite of many power management techniques being employed in the smartphones. This paper starts from the observation that modern smartphones waste a significant amount of the battery's stored energy during power conversion from the 3.7V output of a Li-Ion battery cell to different voltage levels needed to power various modules in a smartphone (processors, memory, display, GPS, etc.) Indeed the power conversion efficiency from the battery source to point of use in the smart phone has on average of only 60-75% efficiency. The approach taken to reduce this energy waste in smartphones is to (i) profile the power consumption of each module under different operating scenarios, (ii) build an equivalent DC-DC converter model for each smartphone module and estimate its power conversion efficiency, and (iii) change the parameters of the actual converters in the smartphone to improve the equivalent power conversion efficiencies for all modules. Experimental results demonstrate that we can achieve 6% to 15% power conversion efficiency enhancement, which translates to up to 30% reduction in the power losses incurred during power conversion in smartphones.

References

[1]
A. Shye, B. Scholbrock, and G. Memik, "Into the wild: Studying real user activity patterns to guide power optimizations for mobile architectures," MICRO, 2009.
[2]
L. Zhang and et al., "Accurate online power estimation and automatic battery behavior based power model generation for smartphones," CODES/ISSS, 2010.
[3]
M. Dong and L. Zhong, "Self-constructive high-rate system energy modeling for battery-powered mobile systems," MobiSys, 2011.
[4]
A. Pathak, Y. C. Hu, M. Zhang, P. Bahl, and Y. Wang, "Fine-grained power modeling for smartphones using system call tracing," EuroSys, 2011.
[5]
W. Yuan and K. Nahrstedt, "Energy-efficient soft real-time CPU scheduling for mobile multimedia systems," SOSP, 2003.
[6]
D. Shin, Y. Kim, N. Chang, and M. Pedram, "Dynamic voltage scaling of oled displays," DAC, 2011.
[7]
I. Choi, H. Shim, and N. Chang, "Low-power color TFT LCD display for hand-held embedded systems," ISLPED, 2002.
[8]
Y. Choi, N. Chang, and T. Kim, "DC-DC converter-aware power management for low-power embedded systems," IEEE T. on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, 2007.
[9]
C. Shi, B. C. Walker, E. Zeisel, E. B. Hu, and G. H. McAllister, "A highly integrated power management IC for advanced mobile applications," CICC, 2006.
[10]
B. Amelifard and M. Pedram, "Optimal design of the power-delivery network for multiple voltage-island system-on-chips," IEEE T. on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, 2009.
[11]
Texas Instruments, "Handset: smartphone," http://www.ti.com/solution/handset_smartphone.
[12]
Qualcomm, "Snapdragon MDP MSM8660 datasheet," https://developer.qualcomm.com/sites/default/files/snapdragon-mdp-8660.pdf.
[13]
J. Xiao, A. Peterchev, J. Zhang, and S. Sanders, "An ultra-low-power digitally-controlled buck converter IC for cellular phone applications," APEC, 2004.
[14]
Y. Du, M. Wang, R. T. Meitl, S. Lukic, and A. Q. Huang, "High-frequency high-efficiency dc-dc converter for distributed energy storage modularization," IECON, 2010.
[15]
F. Hossein, M. Ratul, K. Srikanth, L. Dimitrios, G. Ramesh, and E. Deborah, "Diversity in smartphone usage," MobiSys, 2010.

Cited By

View all
  • (2020)An Ultra-Wide Load Range Voltage Converter Using Proactive Phase Frequency Modulation for IoT SensorsSensors10.3390/s2021627920:21(6279)Online publication date: 4-Nov-2020
  • (2018)Battery-aware Design Exploration of Scheduling Policies for Multi-sensor DevicesProceedings of the 2018 Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI10.1145/3194554.3194588(201-206)Online publication date: 30-May-2018
  • (2017)A High-Efficient Low-Cost Converter for Capacitive Wireless Power Transfer SystemsEnergies10.3390/en1009143710:9(1437)Online publication date: 18-Sep-2017
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. Power conversion efficiency characterization and optimization for smartphones

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Conferences
    ISLPED '12: Proceedings of the 2012 ACM/IEEE international symposium on Low power electronics and design
    July 2012
    438 pages
    ISBN:9781450312493
    DOI:10.1145/2333660
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

    Sponsors

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 30 July 2012

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. dc-dc converter
    2. portable device
    3. power tree
    4. smartphone

    Qualifiers

    • Research-article

    Conference

    ISLPED'12
    Sponsor:
    ISLPED'12: International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design
    July 30 - August 1, 2012
    California, Redondo Beach, USA

    Acceptance Rates

    Overall Acceptance Rate 398 of 1,159 submissions, 34%

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)14
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)1
    Reflects downloads up to 18 Jan 2025

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2020)An Ultra-Wide Load Range Voltage Converter Using Proactive Phase Frequency Modulation for IoT SensorsSensors10.3390/s2021627920:21(6279)Online publication date: 4-Nov-2020
    • (2018)Battery-aware Design Exploration of Scheduling Policies for Multi-sensor DevicesProceedings of the 2018 Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI10.1145/3194554.3194588(201-206)Online publication date: 30-May-2018
    • (2017)A High-Efficient Low-Cost Converter for Capacitive Wireless Power Transfer SystemsEnergies10.3390/en1009143710:9(1437)Online publication date: 18-Sep-2017
    • (2017)Efficient and Secure On-Chip Reconfigurable Voltage Regulation for IoT DevicesProceedings of the Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI 201710.1145/3060403.3060496(369-374)Online publication date: 10-May-2017
    • (2017)Alleviate Chip Pin Constraint for Multicore Processor by On/Off-Chip Power Delivery System CodesignACM Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems10.1145/291479113:2(1-24)Online publication date: 2-Mar-2017
    • (2017)Exploiting Battery-Drain Vulnerabilities in Mobile Smart DevicesIEEE Transactions on Sustainable Computing10.1109/TSUSC.2017.26901482:2(90-99)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2017
    • (2015)Parasitic-Aware Design of Integrated DC–DC Converters With Spiral InductorsIEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems10.1109/TVLSI.2014.238727823:12(3076-3084)Online publication date: Dec-2015
    • (2015)Optimizing a Reconfigurable Power Distribution Network in a Multicore PlatformIEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems10.1109/TCAD.2015.239699834:7(1110-1123)Online publication date: Jul-2015
    • (2015)A design methodology for minimizing power loss in integrated DC-DC converter with spiral inductors2015 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS)10.1109/ISCAS.2015.7169147(2317-2320)Online publication date: May-2015
    • (2014)Optimal offloading control for a mobile device based on a realistic battery model and semi-markov decision processProceedings of the 2014 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design10.5555/2691365.2691441(369-375)Online publication date: 3-Nov-2014
    • Show More Cited By

    View Options

    Login options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Media

    Figures

    Other

    Tables

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media