Power-management high-level synthesis

Abstract

Power management is an integral part of almost every new system design. It enables to keep the power under constrains, implementing such power-reduction techniques as power gating, multi-voltage design, or voltage and frequency scaling. Due to the complexity of modern designs, the system level of abstraction is adopted as a design starting point. However, the power management is not yet fully adopted at such abstraction level. In the previous research, we have proposed the abstract power-management specification, simplifying its adoption by an order of magnitude. This paper targets the power-management high-level synthesis, closing thus the gap between the system-level power management and its standard form at lower abstraction levels. Such design automation enables to reduce a number of human errors, potentially introduced by manual design. The presented experimental results validate the proposed approach.