Automatic Correction of Dynamic Power Management Architecture in Modern Processors

Abstract

The increasing demand for lower power forces designers to use sophisticated power management strategies such as multivoltage and power gating which are often accompanied with many design bugs. Correcting such bugs can be a time-consuming process that requires considerable manual efforts. In this paper, we propose a scalable automated method for correcting dynamic power management architectures by an incremental SAT-based mechanism. First, an initial counterexample (CEX) is generated by checking the equivalency between the specification model of the processor and its buggy implementation model. Then, we find two candidate solutions instead of one to satisfy this CEX. If two solutions are not equivalent, we generate new CEX in an iterative process which effectively converges into the final solution. The proposed method enables designers to correct multiple bugs such as missing isolation cells between two power domains, disordering in the sequence of control signals, error in the data restoring or saving, and powering off in always-on domains which are not addressed by existing methods. We have shown the effectiveness of our method on modern processors supporting complex power management mechanisms. The results confirm that our proposed method, respectively, reduces symbolic simulation steps and runtime by 2.33× and 47.93× compared to the state-of-the-art methods.