Towards early validation of firmware-based power management using virtual prototypes: A constrained random approach

Efficient power management is very important for modern System-on-Chip to satisfy the conflicting demands on high performance and low power consumption. Nowadays, global power management is mostly implemented in firmware (FW) due to the relative ease of development and its flexibility. Recent advances in system-level power modeling and estimation open up opportunities for early validation of these FW-based power management strategies. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for this purpose using SystemC-based Virtual Prototypes (VPs) and constrained random (CR) techniques. The CR-generated representative system workloads are executed in a power-aware FW/VP co-simulation to validate that available performance and power budgets are satisfied. As a proof-of-concept, we demonstrate our power validation approach on the LEON3-based SoCRocket VP.