Speed and voltage selection for GALS systems based on voltage/frequency islands

Due to increasing clock speeds and shrinking technologies, distributing a single global clock signal throughout a chip is becoming a difficult and challenging proposition. In this paper, we address the problem of energy optimal local speed and voltage selection in frequency/voltage island based systems under given performance constraints. Our results show that static voltage and speed assignment can achieve up to 42 % savings in total energy for various media and signal processing applications, while application specific dynamic approaches provide up to 44 % energy savings in the case of MPEG-2 encoder application, when compared to a single clocked system architecture.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ASPDAC
• Authors: Koushik Niyogi, Diana Marculescu
• Keywords: ASPDAC 2005, Global Clock Signal, Hardware, MPEG-2 Encoder Application, Optimal Local Speed