Faisal Alam, P. Panda, Nikhil Tripathi, Namita Sharma, Sanjiv Narayan
{"title":"Energy optimization in Android applications through wakelock placement","authors":"Faisal Alam, P. Panda, Nikhil Tripathi, Namita Sharma, Sanjiv Narayan","doi":"10.7873/DATE.2014.101","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7873/DATE.2014.101","url":null,"abstract":"Energy efficiency is a critical factor in mobile systems, and a significant body of recent research efforts has focused on reducing the energy dissipation in mobile hardware and applications. The Android OS Power Manager provides programming interface routines called wakelocks for controlling the activation state of devices on a mobile system. An appropriate placement of wakelock acquire and release functions in the application can make a significant difference to the energy consumption. In this paper, we propose a data flow analysis based strategy for determining the placement of wakelock statements corresponding to the uses of devices in an application. Our experimental evaluation on a set of Android applications show significant (up to 32%) energy savings with the proposed optimization strategy.","PeriodicalId":6550,"journal":{"name":"2014 Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition (DATE)","volume":"47 1","pages":"1-4"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-03-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86573377","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"SuperRange: Wide operational range power delivery design for both STV and NTV computing","authors":"Xin He, Guihai Yan, Yinhe Han, Xiaowei Li","doi":"10.7873/DATE.2014.159","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7873/DATE.2014.159","url":null,"abstract":"The load power range of modern processors is greatly enlarged because many advanced power management techniques like dynamic voltage frequency scaling, Turbo boosting, and Near Threshold Voltage technologies are incorporated. However, the power saving may be offset by power loss in power delivery; moreover, as the efficiency of power delivery varies greatly with different load conditions, conventional power delivery designs cannot maintain high efficiency over the entire voltage range. We propose SuperRange, a wide operational range power delivery scheme. SuperRange complements the power delivery capability of on-chip voltage regulator and off-chip voltage regulator. Experimental results show SuperRange has an average 70% power conversion efficiency over wide operational range which outperforms conventional power delivery schemes. And it also exhibits superior resilience to power-constrained systems.","PeriodicalId":6550,"journal":{"name":"2014 Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition (DATE)","volume":"63 1","pages":"1-6"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-03-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90449702","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Xuan Wang, Jiang Xu, Zhe Wang, K. J. Chen, Xiaowen Wu, Zhehui Wang
{"title":"Characterizing power delivery systems with on/off-chip voltage regulators for many-core processors","authors":"Xuan Wang, Jiang Xu, Zhe Wang, K. J. Chen, Xiaowen Wu, Zhehui Wang","doi":"10.7873/DATE.2014.060","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7873/DATE.2014.060","url":null,"abstract":"Design of power delivery system has great influence on the power management in many-core processor systems. Moving voltage regulators from off-chip to on-chip gains more and more interest in the power delivery system design, because it is able to provide fast voltage scaling and multiple power domains. Previous works are proposed to implement power efficient on-chip regulators. It is also important to analyze the characteristics of the entire power delivery system to explore the tradeoff between the promising properties and costs of employing on-chip regulators. In this work, we develop an analytical model to evaluate important characteristics of the power delivery system, including on-chip/off-chip voltage regulators and the passive on-chip/on-board parasitic. Compared with SPICE simulations, our model achieves a fast system-level evaluation with comparable accuracy. Based on the model, geometric programming is utilized to find the optimal power efficiency of different architectures of power delivery systems under constraints of output voltage stability and area. Experiments show that compared with the conventional architecture using off-chip regulators, the hybrid one using both on-chip and off-chip voltage regulators achieves 1.0% power efficiency improvement and 68% area reduction of voltage regulators on average. We conclude that the hybrid architecture has potential for high power efficiency and small area at heavy workload, but careful account for the overhead of on-chip regulators is needed.","PeriodicalId":6550,"journal":{"name":"2014 Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition (DATE)","volume":"68 1","pages":"1-4"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-03-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90456992","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Fast and accurate computation using stochastic circuits","authors":"Armin Alaghi, J. Hayes","doi":"10.7873/DATE2014.089","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7873/DATE2014.089","url":null,"abstract":"Stochastic computing (SC) is a low-cost design technique that has great promise in applications such as image processing. SC enables arithmetic operations to be performed on stochastic bit-streams using ultra-small and low-power circuitry. However, accurate computations tend to require long run-times due to the random fluctuations inherent in stochastic numbers (SNs). We present novel techniques for SN generation that lead to better accuracy/run-time trade-offs. First, we analyze a property called progressive precision (PP) which allows computational accuracy to grow systematically with run-time. Second, borrowing from Monte Carlo methods, we show that SC performance can be greatly improved by replacing the usual pseudo-random number sources by low-discrepancy (LD) sequences that are predictably progressive. Finally, we evaluate the use of LD stochastic numbers in SC, and show they can produce significantly faster and more accurate results than existing stochastic designs.","PeriodicalId":6550,"journal":{"name":"2014 Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition (DATE)","volume":"41 1","pages":"1-4"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-03-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89407364","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
S. Gangopadhyay, Youngtak Lee, Saad Bin Nasir, A. Raychowdhury
{"title":"Modeling and analysis of digital linear dropout regulators with adaptive control for high efficiency under wide dynamic range digital loads","authors":"S. Gangopadhyay, Youngtak Lee, Saad Bin Nasir, A. Raychowdhury","doi":"10.7873/DATE.2014.160","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7873/DATE.2014.160","url":null,"abstract":"Discrete time digital linear regulators, including low dropout regulators (LDOs) have become competitive in muti-Vcc digital systems for fine-grained spatio-temporal voltage regulation and distribution. However, wide dynamic current range of the digital load circuits poses serious problems in maintaining stability and high efficiency at all corners. In this paper we present a control model for discrete time LDOs and demonstrate how online adaptive control can be employed for consistent performance and high efficiency across the load current range.","PeriodicalId":6550,"journal":{"name":"2014 Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition (DATE)","volume":"81 1","pages":"1-6"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-03-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76782016","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Daniele Bortolotti, Andrea Bartolini, C. Weis, D. Rossi, L. Benini
{"title":"Hybrid memory architecture for voltage scaling in ultra-low power multi-core biomedical processors","authors":"Daniele Bortolotti, Andrea Bartolini, C. Weis, D. Rossi, L. Benini","doi":"10.7873/DATE.2014.182","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7873/DATE.2014.182","url":null,"abstract":"Technology scaling enables today the design of sensor-based ultra-low cost chips well suited for emerging applications such as wireless body sensor networks, urban life and environment monitoring. Energy consumption is the key limiting factor of this up-coming revolution and memories are often the energy bottleneck mainly due to leakage power. This paper proposes an ultra-low power multi-core architecture targeting eHealth monitoring systems, where applications involve collection of sequences of slow biomedical signals and highly parallel computations at very low voltage. We propose a hybrid memory architecture that combines 6T-SRAM and 8T-SRAM operating in the same voltage domain and capable of dispatching at high voltage a normal operation and at low voltage a fully reliable small memory partition (8T) while the rest of the memory (6T) is state-retentive. Our architecture offers significant energy savings with a low area overhead in typical eHealth Compressed Sensing-based applications.","PeriodicalId":6550,"journal":{"name":"2014 Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition (DATE)","volume":"210 1","pages":"1-6"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-03-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76115628","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Tiansheng Zhang, José L. Abellán, A. Joshi, A. Coskun
{"title":"Thermal management of manycore systems with silicon-photonic networks","authors":"Tiansheng Zhang, José L. Abellán, A. Joshi, A. Coskun","doi":"10.7873/DATE.2014.320","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7873/DATE.2014.320","url":null,"abstract":"Silicon-photonic network-on-chips (NoCs) provide high bandwidth density; therefore, they are promising candidates to replace electrical NoCs in manycore systems. The silicon-photonic NoCs, however, are sensitive to the temperature gradients that typically occur on the chip, and hence, require proactive thermal management. This paper first provides a design space exploration of silicon-photonic networks in manycore systems and quantifies the performance impact of the temperature gradients for various network bandwidths. The paper then introduces a novel job allocation technique that minimizes the temperature gradients among the ring modulators/filters to improve the application performance. Experimental results for a single-chip 256-core system demonstrate that our policy is able to maintain the maximum network bandwidth. Compared to existing workload allocation policies, the proposed policy improves system performance by up to 26.1% when running a single application and 18.3% for multi-program scenarios.","PeriodicalId":6550,"journal":{"name":"2014 Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition (DATE)","volume":"1 1","pages":"1-6"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-03-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76238958","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Efficient simulation and modelling of non-rectangular NoC topologies","authors":"Ji Qi, Mark Zwolinski","doi":"10.7873/DATE2014.298","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7873/DATE2014.298","url":null,"abstract":"With increasing chip complexity, Networks-on-Chips (NoCs) are becoming a central platform for future on-chip communications. Many regular NoC architectures have been proposed to eliminate the communication bottlenecks of traditional bus-based networks. Non-rectangular and irregular architectures have also been proposed to increase performance. However, the complexity of designing custom non-rectangular networks leads to a rapid increase in design and verification times. To alleviate the conflict between performance and efficiency, this paper proposes a novel method that efficiently constructs virtual non-rectangular topologies on a mesh network by using time-regulated models to emulate irregular patterns. Data routings on virtual hexagonal and two irregular geometries validate the proposed method. An MPEG-4 decoder is used to exemplify the proposed method for media applications. Results analysis shows the virtual topologies emulated by the proposed method can provide precise timing and energy performance.","PeriodicalId":6550,"journal":{"name":"2014 Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition (DATE)","volume":"110 1","pages":"1-4"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-03-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76301241","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Heba Khdr, T. Ebi, M. Shafique, H. Amrouch, J. Henkel
{"title":"mDTM: Multi-objective dynamic thermal management for on-chip systems","authors":"Heba Khdr, T. Ebi, M. Shafique, H. Amrouch, J. Henkel","doi":"10.7873/DATE.2014.343","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7873/DATE.2014.343","url":null,"abstract":"Thermal hot spots and unbalanced temperatures between cores on chip can cause either degradation in performance or may have a severe impact on reliability, or both. In this paper, we propose mDTM, a proactive dynamic thermal management technique for on-chip systems. It employs multi-objective management for migrating tasks in order to both prevent the system from hitting an undesirable thermal threshold and to balance the temperatures between the cores. Our evaluation on the Intel SCC platform shows that mDTM can successfully avoid a given thermal threshold and reduce spatial thermal variation by 22%. Compared to state-of-the-art, our mDTM achieves up to 58% performance gain. Additionally, we deploy an FPGA and IR camera based setup to analyze the effectiveness of our technique.","PeriodicalId":6550,"journal":{"name":"2014 Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition (DATE)","volume":"203 1","pages":"1-6"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-03-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73213808","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
M. Kamal, Amin Ghasemazar, A. Afzali-Kusha, M. Pedram
{"title":"Improving efficiency of extensible processors by using approximate custom instructions","authors":"M. Kamal, Amin Ghasemazar, A. Afzali-Kusha, M. Pedram","doi":"10.7873/DATE.2014.238","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7873/DATE.2014.238","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper, we propose to move the conventional extensible processor design flow to the approximate computing domain to gain more speedup. In this domain, the instruction set architecture (ISA) design flow selects both exact and approximate custom instructions (CIs). The proposed approach could be used for the applications where imprecise results may be tolerated. In the CI identification phase of the flow, the CIs which do not satisfy the maximum propagation delay but can provide approximate results also may be included in the CI candidate set. Next, in the selection phase, we propose a merit function which selects CIs with higher cycle savings and small error rates. The efficacy of the proposed approximate design flow is investigated using the case studies of the discrete cosine transform (DCT) and inverse DCT (iDCT) of the MPEG2 application. Also, the impact of the process variation on the impreciseness of the results is investigated.","PeriodicalId":6550,"journal":{"name":"2014 Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition (DATE)","volume":"104 1","pages":"1-4"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-03-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73282259","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}