Abstract:

The work contained in this dissertation aims to provide embedded and mobile computing system developers with methods and tools to improve the performance and energy efficiency of these systems. The thesis begins with introductory material, which is provided to familiarize the reader with these systems and motivate the rest of the work contained in this thesis. After the introduction, a discussion of related work is presented. The body of this work is divided into three major parts: system-level design tool aids, energy-efficient programming techniques and energy-efficient graphical user interface ( E2 GUI) design.

The first part, system-level design tool aids, describes two tools that can be used to aid research in the system-level design community. The first tool, TGG, generates inputs for system-level design tools from system specifications written in C. TGG parses the source code and automatically determines control and data dependencies between statements in the code. The second tool, TGFF, has been used in allocation and scheduling research for several years. The work in this dissertation presents a set of features that have been added to improve the versatility and utility of TGFF.

The second part, energy-efficient programming techniques, presents two techniques for improving software energy efficiency. The first technique focuses on optimizing the control flow of embedded system software. It uses condition probabilities to reorder conditional statements. The second technique allows developers to improve system performance by using a combination of C and Java. Developers can capitalize on the relative strengths of each language by using the Java Native Interface (JNI).

The third part, E2 GUI design, presents techniques for improving the energy efficiency of mobile computing system user interfaces by reducing power consumption and improving performance. Power can be reduced by using low-power color schemes and reducing the frequency of screen updates. Performance can be improved by designing the GUI to enable quicker user interaction.

The last chapter of this dissertation presents conclusions and offers future research directions. A brief commentary on the future of embedded systems is also provided in the final chapter.