On-Chip Sensor Network for Efficient Management of Power Gating-Induced Power/Ground Noise in Multiprocessor System on Chip

Abstract

Reducing feature sizes and power supply voltage allows integrating more processing units (PUs) on multiprocessor system on chip (MPSoC) to satisfy the increasing demands of applications. However, it also makes MPSoC more susceptible to various reliability threats, such as high temperature and power/ground (P/G) noise. As the scale and complexity of MPSoC continuously increase, monitoring and mitigating reliability threats at runtime could offer better performance, scalability, and flexibility for MPSoC designs. In this paper, we propose a systematic approach, on-chip sensor network (SENoC), to collaboratively predict, detect, report, and alleviate runtime threats in MPSoC. SENoC not only detects reliability threats and shares related information among PUs, but also plans and coordinates the reactions of related PUs in MPSoC. SENoC is used to alleviate the impacts of simultaneous switching noise in MPSoC's P/G network during power gating. Based on the detailed noise behaviors under different scenarios derived by our circuit-level MPSoC P/G noise simulation and analysis platform, simulation results show that SENoC helps to achieve on average 26.2 percent performance improvement compared with the traditional stop-go method with 1.4 percent area overhead in an 8*8-core MPSoC in 45 nm. An architecture-level cycle-accurate simulator based on SystemC is implemented to study the performance of the proposed SENoC. By applying sophisticated scheduling techniques to optimize the total system performance, a higher performance improvement of 43.5 percent is achieved for a set of real-life applications.