A fine grain variation-aware dynamic Vdd-hopping AVFS architecture on a 32nm GALS MPSoC

E. Beigne (1) , I. Miro-Panades (1) , Yvain Thonnart (1) , L. Alacoque (1) , Pascal Vivet (1) , S. Lesecq (1) , D. Puschini (1) , F. Thabet (2) , B. Tain (2) , K. Benchehida (2) , Sylvain Engels (3) , R. Wilson (3) , D. Fuin (3)

1 CEA-LETI - Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives - Laboratoire d'Electronique et de Technologie de l'Information
2 DACLE-LIST - Département d'Architectures, Conception et Logiciels Embarqués-LIST
3 ST-CROLLES - STMicroelectronics [Crolles]

In order to optimize global energy efficiency in the context of dynamic Process-Voltage-Temperature variations in advanced nodes, a fine-grain Adaptive Voltage and Frequency Scaling architecture is proposed and implemented on a 32 nm GALS Multi-Processor SoC. Each Processing Element is an independent Voltage-Frequency island and shows up to 18.2% energy gains due to local adaptability. Compared to a worst case approach, our proposal also allows a frequency boosting around 25% for a total area overhead of 10% including local frequency/voltage actuators, sensors and digital controller.

Keywords: Adaptive voltage; Area overhead; Digital controllers; Frequency-scaling; Local frequency; Multi-processor SoC; Processing elements; Voltage-frequency islands; Energy efficiency; Microprocessor chips

Domains: Engineering Sciences [physics]

E. Beigne, I. Miro-Panades, Yvain Thonnart, L. Alacoque, Pascal Vivet, et al.. A fine grain variation-aware dynamic Vdd-hopping AVFS architecture on a 32nm GALS MPSoC. 2013 Proceedings of the ESSCIRC (ESSCIRC), Sep 2013, Bucharest, Romania. pp.57-60, ⟨10.1109/ESSCIRC.2013.6649071⟩. ⟨cea-01837015⟩