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Flexible on-chip power delivery for energy efficient heterogeneous systems

Published: 29 May 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Heterogeneous systems-on-chip pose a challenge for power delivery given the variety of needs for different components. In this paper, we describe recent work that leverages power switches and conventional EDA toolflows to implement a set of power delivery schemes that provide a flexible, adaptable range of options for power management of SoCs for which energy efficiency is important. We first present an enhanced dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) scheme that uses power switches to provide rapid changes in the energy-speed operating point to match workloads at a component level. To demonstrate this approach, we describe a data flow processor chip in 90nm CMOS that supports flexible operation from 0.25V with super high energy efficiency up to GHz speeds at 1.2V. This chip shows that our low overhead method to scale energy consumption with the performance requirement supports both high performance and ultra low energy (>10X reduction in energy per operation) in the same circuit. We discuss power switch design for this scheme and investigate strategies for optimizing power switches for different operating modes. Finally, we show how segmented power switches offer several advantages for flexibly managing leakage and for modulating local voltages with low overhead.

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  • (2017)IGS: The Novel Fast IC Power Ground Network Optimization Flow Based on Improved Gauss-Seidel MethodAdvances in Science, Technology and Engineering Systems Journal10.25046/aj0203912:3(711-721)Online publication date: Jun-2017
  • (2017)Fault tolerant reconfigurable hardware design using BIST on SRAM: A review2017 International Conference on Intelligent Computing and Control (I2C2)10.1109/I2C2.2017.8321907(1-16)Online publication date: Jun-2017
  • (2016)Exploration of associative power management with instruction governed operation for ultra-low power designProceedings of the 53rd Annual Design Automation Conference10.1145/2897937.2898021(1-6)Online publication date: 5-Jun-2016
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cover image ACM Conferences
DAC '13: Proceedings of the 50th Annual Design Automation Conference
May 2013
1285 pages
ISBN:9781450320719
DOI:10.1145/2463209
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]

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Published: 29 May 2013

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Author Tags

  1. PDVS
  2. dynamic voltage scaling
  3. leakage
  4. low power design
  5. variable weighted headers

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Cited By

View all
  • (2017)IGS: The Novel Fast IC Power Ground Network Optimization Flow Based on Improved Gauss-Seidel MethodAdvances in Science, Technology and Engineering Systems Journal10.25046/aj0203912:3(711-721)Online publication date: Jun-2017
  • (2017)Fault tolerant reconfigurable hardware design using BIST on SRAM: A review2017 International Conference on Intelligent Computing and Control (I2C2)10.1109/I2C2.2017.8321907(1-16)Online publication date: Jun-2017
  • (2016)Exploration of associative power management with instruction governed operation for ultra-low power designProceedings of the 53rd Annual Design Automation Conference10.1145/2897937.2898021(1-6)Online publication date: 5-Jun-2016
  • (2014)Dynamic variability management in mobile multicore processors under lifetime constraints2014 IEEE 32nd International Conference on Computer Design (ICCD)10.1109/ICCD.2014.6974718(448-455)Online publication date: Oct-2014

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