Mobile Terminals System-Level Memory Exploratio for Power and Performance Optimization

Abstract

Mobile devices, at each new release of the standards and following users' continuous requests of new services, have to support more and more features, which are also becoming more and more demanding from the computational point of view. As a consequence, being able to fulfil new requirements and at the same time to provide power efficient chips is nowadays the most important challenge for mobile devices system designers. To tackle this challenge, novel system level performance and power modeling approaches have been proposed allowing hardware/software (HW/SW) architectures to be explored right at the very first steps of a System-on-Chip (SoC) design flow. However, existing solutions have limited support for the power optimization of the memory system (including SDRAM) that may occupy more than 70% of a chip area and consume more than 30% of the total energy. In this paper, we propose a SystemC-TLM-based simulation framework at Electronic System Level (ESL), which is able to support the joint exploration of a SoC architecture and its memory configuration. This new framework helps in optimizing the SoC energy consumption while matching the required performance in terms of power and performance, as well as of memory bandwidth and latency.