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

Abstract : 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.