Introduction to the Special Issue on Domain-Specific System-on-Chip Architectures and Run-Time Management Techniques
Umit Yusuf Ogras, Radu Mărculescu, Trevor Mudge, Michael Kishinevsky · ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems · 2023
Domain-specific systems-on-chip (DSSoCs), a class of heterogeneous many-core systems, are recognized as a promising approach to narrowing down the performance and energy-efficiency gap between custom hardware accelerators and programmable processors.However, fulfilling this promise depends on successfully addressing a number of fundamental research questions.For instance, given a target domain, a designer must develop a suitable architecture and determine the set of appropriate hardware accelerators.While integrating too many accelerators would increase the design cost, missing critical accelerators can undermine the system performance and energy efficiency.Typically, a rich set of accelerators can dramatically lower the processing times.Hence, the rest of the system components, such as the on-chip communication, must also match the high performance requirements and enable nanosecond-level latencies between the IP blocks and accelerators.DSSoCs must also provide software tools, application programming interfaces (APIs), and accelerator interfaces such that application developers can utilize them efficiently.Finally, a range of runtime management methodologies and algorithms are required to make the best use of the DSSoC resources and power budgets.This Special Issue presents eleven research papers and a survey targeting these topics selected from over 40 submissions.It represents a remarkable collective effort involving both the academic and industrial research communities.The articles in this issue present novel and impactful solutions to important research problems, including novel device technologies, hardware accelerators, high-level synthesis techniques, design space exploration, scheduling, virtualization, compiler, and test techniques for domain-specific designs.The survey article titled "Domain-Specific Architectures (DSAs): Research Problems and Promising Approaches" provides a comprehensive overview of various research directions, outstanding challenges, and promising approaches in DSSoC system design.Starting from the lowest level of abstraction, the article "Experimental Demonstration of STT-MRAM-based Nonvolatile Instantly On/Off System: Case Studies" presents a solution for IoT applications using nonvolatile STT-MRAMs.Experimental results show 15.1% lower power consumption with two orders of magnitude faster data restore time.At the hardware design level, the paper titled "SHARP: An Adaptable, Energy-Efficient Accelerator for Recurrent Neural Network" identifies adaptiveness as a key feature missing from existing RNN accelerators.It proposes an intelligent tiled-based dispatching mechanism to efficiently handle the data dependencies.The