FPGA platform for emulation of composable and predictable MPSoC power management
She, D Dongrui · TU/e Research Portal · 2009
As the IC technology is advancing quickly, Multi-processor System-on-Chip (MPSoC) becomes the trend of embedded System-on-Chip (SoC) design. A typical modern MPSoC for embedded systems usually runs multiple applications, some of which have real-time requirements. To meet the real-time requirements, predictable system is needed. The interference between applications in the MPSoC usually result in exponential increase in design and verification complexity. To avoid such situations, we need composable system, on which the temporal behavior of different applications does not depend on each other. In modern IC design, especially for embedded systems, power consumption is becoming a major constraint, which means power management is essential for MPSoC. Hence we need composable and predictable MPSoC with power management capability. In this thesis, the design and implementation of an FPGA-based composable and predictable platform for emulating the power management of MPSoC are presented. The platform consists of multiple MicroBlaze processor cores and AEthereal Network on Chip (NoC) is used as the interconnection. The platform enables the sharing of different resources, including the processer, among different applications in a composable way. The support for data-flow application in the platform hardware and software enables the predictable execution of streaming applications. And with the power management hardware and software infrastructure, composable and predictable power management for each application is possible. The support for power management in data-flow application is implemented and demonstrated in the experiments, which saves up to 50% energy compared to the trivial power management policy.