The scheme, dubbed shared recovery technique, was the subject of a paper presented at the International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD) Monday (Nov. 2) by Baoxian Zhao, a computer science graduate student at George Mason University.

According to the paper, the main thrust of the shared recovery technique is the designation of a global shared recovery block with a design that can be used by any task at run time. Simulation results show that the technique can achieve up to 35 percent energy savings when compared to existing reliability-aware power management schemes, according to the paper.

Zhao noted that dynamic voltage scaling remains a wildly popular technique for energy management in embedded applications. But, he said, recent research demonstrates that dynamic voltage scaling has a significant negative impact on system reliability.

Zhao co-authored the ICCAD paper, titled "Enhanced Reliability-Aware Power Management through Shared Recovery Technique," along with Hakan Aydin from George Mason and Dakai Zhu from the University of Texas at San Antonio.