A METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR CONTROLLING POWER CONSUMPTION IN AN INTEGRATED CIRCUIT

摘要

In a microprocessor based system (400), a programmable power management unit (PPMU) (414) dynamically controls the supply of power to a microprocessor (402) by analyzing the processing requirements of each instruction sequence or processing thread to determine whether a task should be performed by the PPMU (414) or passed to the microprocessor (402) according to a power management specification or power saving scheme. The PPMU (414) establishes the voltage level provided to the microprocessor via a power regulator/controller (412). External interrupts communicated to the system are handled by a universal interrupt controller (UIC) (410). The PPMU (414) may process an interrupt itself or forward execution to the microprocessor (402), activating the microprocessor from an idle state, if necessary. The PPMU (414) may also control power management functions internal to the processor, such as a clock generator divisor values or voltage island switching to dynamically scale performance in accordance with current processing requirements.