Specialization for energy efficiency using agile development
Borivoje Nikolić, Jonathan Bachrach, Elad Alon, Krste Asanović, David A. Patterson · 2015
Designing hardware specialized for a target application domain dramatically improves energy efficiency. However, the design of specialized hardware is hampered by high cost, dominated by the effort needed to design, validate, and verify the custom integrated circuit. An agile design approach, discussed here, relies on hardware generators coupled with rapid design of iterative prototypes and open source to reduce the cost of hardware specialization.