Energy-aware synthesis of application specific MPSoCs

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a framework for synthesis of application specific MultiProcessor System on Chip (MPSoC) for multimedia applications. Our framework searches for a design with minimum energy consumption under area and period constraints. We simultaneously explore selection of voltage-frequency levels, custom instructions, cache configurations, and task mapping. We propose an optimal algorithm based on prune and search operations to efficiently search the complex design space. We also present a heuristic based on map and customize stages to better handle the exponential complexity of the design space, and rapidly find near-optimal solutions. These algorithms are aided by two estimators that can quickly estimate period and energy consumption of a given design point. Experiments reveal that our framework can reduce energy consumption by 37.9% on an average and 57.1% maximum reduction compared to solutions obtained from a combination of existing techniques.