Power mitigation of a heterogeneous multicore architecture on FPGA/ASIC by DFS/DVFS techniques

Abstract

This article presents an integrated self-aware computing model in a Heterogeneous Multicore Architecture (HMA) to mitigate the power dissipation of an Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (OFDM) receiver. The proposed platform consists of template-based Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Array (CGRA) devices connected through a Network-on-Chip (NoC) around a few Reduced Instruction-Set Computing (RISC) cores. The self-aware computing model exploits Feedback Control System (FCS) which constantly monitors the execution-time of each core and dynamically scales the operating frequency of each node of the NoC depending on the worst execution-time. Therefore, the performance of the overall system is equalized towards a desired level besides mitigating the power dissipation. Measurement results obtained from Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) synthesis show up to 20.2% dynamic power dissipation and 16.8% total power dissipation savings. Since FCS technique can be employed for scaling the frequency and the voltage and on the other hand, voltage supply cannot be scaled on the FPGA-based prototyped platform, the implementation is also estimated in 28nm Ultra-Thin Body and Buried oxide (UTBB) Fully-Depleted Silicon-On-Insulator (FD-SOI) Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) technology to scale voltage in addition to frequency and get more benefits in terms of dynamic power dissipation reduction. Subsequent to synthesizing the whole platform on ASIC and scaling the voltage and frequency simultaneously as a Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) method, significant dynamic power dissipation savings by 5.97X against Dynamic Frequency Scaling (DFS) method were obtained.