How would a circuit actually make decisions about voltage and frequency scaling?
The decisions about scaling can be done at the level of circuit (hardware implementation) or at the level of system (software implementation). The criteria to make these decisions may be diverse and will depend on the type of application and environment. We can analyze two examples. Let us assume that a device is producing data in a pipeline. The data is sent to a FIFO and is received by a consumer. Depending on the relative speed of the producer and the consumer, the FIFO may spend most of its time empty or full. A voltage/frequency control circuit might decide to raise/lower the voltage depending on the average occupancy of the FIFO. In this way, the speed and power of the producer could be automatically adjusted to the speed of the consumer. A second example could illustrate voltage/frequency scaling at the system level. In an SoC, different components might be collaborating in the execution of a task. This task might require the execution of several subtasks in different components
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