Low Power Processor Architectures and Contemporary Techniques for Power Optimization – A Review

The technological evolution has increased the number of transistors for a given die area significantly and increased the switching speed from few MHz to GHz range. Such inversely proportional decline in size and boost in performance consequently demands shrinking of supply voltage and effective power dissipation in chips with millions of transistors. This has triggered substantial amount of research in power reduction techniques into almost every aspect of the chip and particularly the processor cores contained in the chip. This paper presents an overview of techniques for achieving the power efficiency mainly at the processor core level but also visits related domains such as buses and memories. There are various processor parameters and features such as supply voltage, clock frequency, cache and pipelining which can be optimized to reduce the power consumption of the processor. This paper discusses various ways in which these parameters can be optimized. Also, emerging power efficient processor architectures are overviewed and research activities are discussed which should help reader identify how these factors in a processor contribute to power consumption. Some of these concepts have been already established whereas others are still active research areas. © 2009 ACADEMY PUBLISHER

Mutual Impact between Clock Gating and High Level Synthesis in Reconfigurable Hardware Accelerators

With the diffusion of cyber-physical systems and internet of things, adaptivity and low power consumption became of primary importance in digital systems design. Reconfigurable heterogeneous platforms seem to be one of the most suitable choices to cope with such challenging context. However, their development and power optimization are not trivial, especially considering hardware acceleration components. On the one hand high level synthesis could simplify the design of such kind of systems, but on the other hand it can limit the positive effects of the adopted power saving techniques. In this work, the mutual impact of different high level synthesis tools and the application of the well known clock gating strategy in the development of reconfigurable accelerators is studied. The aim is to optimize a clock gating application according to the chosen high level synthesis engine and target technology (Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) or Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)). Different levels of application of clock gating are evaluated, including a novel multi level solution. Besides assessing the benefits and drawbacks of the clock gating application at different levels, hints for future design automation of low power reconfigurable accelerators through high level synthesis are also derived

Emerging embedded nonvolatile memory solution for ultra low power microcontroller systems

13301甲第4810号博士（工学）金沢大学博士論文本文Full 以下に掲載および掲載予定：1.IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits 27(4) pp.569-573 1992. IEEE. 共著者：M. Hayashikoshi, H. Hidaka, K. Arimoto, K. Fujishima 2.IEEE Transactions on Multi-Scale Computing Systems IEEE. 共著者：M. Hayashikoshi, H. Noda, H. Kawai, Y. Murai, S. Otani, K. Nii, Y. Matsuda, H. Kond

Energy efficient design of an adaptive switching algorithm for the iterative-MIMO receiver

An efficient design dedicated for iterative-multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) receiver systems is now imperative in our world since data demands are increasing tremendously in wireless networks. This puts a massive burden on the signal processing power especially in small receiver systems where power sources are often shared or limited. This thesis proposes an attractive solution to both the wireless signal processing and the architectural implementation design sides of the problem. A novel algorithm, dubbed the Adaptive Switching Algorithm, is proven to not only save more than a third of the energy consumption in the algorithmic design, but is also able to achieve an energy reduction of more than 50% in terms of processing power when the design is mapped onto state-of-the-art programmable hardware. Simulations are based in MatlabTM using the Monte Carlo approach, where multiple additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and Rayleigh fading channels for both fast and slow fading environments were investigated. The software selects the appropriate detection algorithm depending on the current channel conditions. The design for the hardware is based on the latest field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) hardware from Xilinx R , specifically the Virtex-5 and Virtex-7 chipsets. They were chosen during the experimental phase to verify the results in order to examine trends for energy consumption in the proposed algorithm design. Savings come from dynamic allocation of the hardware resources by implementing power minimization techniques depending on the processing requirements of the system. Having demonstrated the feasibility of the algorithm in controlled environments, realistic channel conditions were simulated using spatially correlated MIMO channels to test the algorithm’s readiness for real-world deployment. The proposed algorithm is placed in both the MIMO detector and the iterative-decoder blocks of the receiver. When the final full receiver design setup is implemented, it shows that the key to energy saving lies in the fact that both software and hardware components of the Adaptive Switching Algorithm adopt adaptivity in the respective designs. The detector saves energy by selecting suitable detection schemes while the decoder provides adaptivity by limiting the number of decoding iterations, both of which are updated in real-time. The overall receiver can achieve more than 70% energy savings in comparison to state-of-the-art iterative-MIMO receivers and thus it can be concluded that this level of ‘intelligence’ is an important direction towards a more efficient iterative-MIMO receiver designs in the future

Architectures for Adaptive Low-Power Embedded Multimedia Systems

This Ph.D. thesis describes novel hardware/software architectures for adaptive low-power embedded multimedia systems. Novel techniques for run-time adaptive energy management are proposed, such that both HW & SW adapt together to react to the unpredictable scenarios. A complete power-aware H.264 video encoder was developed. Comparison with state-of-the-art demonstrates significant energy savings while meeting the performance constraint and keeping the video quality degradation unnoticeable