Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD (대한전자공학회논문지SD)

The Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers (대한전자공학회)
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NoC Energy Measurement and Analysis with a Cycle-accurate Energy Measurement Tool for Virtex-II FPGAs

네트워크-온-칩 설계의 전력 소모 분석을 위한 Virtex-II FPGA의 싸이클별 전력 소모 측정 도구 개발

  • Lee, Hyung-Gyu (School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, Seoul National University) ;
  • Chang, Nae-Hyuck (School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, Seoul National University)
  • 이형규 (서울대학교 전기컴퓨터공학부) ;
  • 장래혁 (서울대학교 전기컴퓨터공학부)
  • Published : 2007.02.25
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Abstract

The NoC (network-on-chip) approach is a promising solution to the increasing complexity of on-chip communication problems because of its high scalability. But, NoC applications generally consume a lot of power, because they require a large design space to accommodate many parallel IPs and network communication channels. It is not easy to analyze the power consumption of NoC applications with conventional simulation methods using simple power models. In addition, there are also many limitations in using sophisticated simulation models because they require long execution time and large efforts. In this paper, we apply a cycle-accurate energy measurement technique and tool to the FPGA prototypes, which are generally used to verify the correctness of SoC designs, as a practical indication of the power consumption of real NoC applications. An NoC-based JPEG encoder implementation is used as a case study to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

네트워크-온-칩(NoC, network-on-chip) 기술은 SoC (system-on-a-chip) 설계에서 증가되는 온칩 통신의 복잡성을 해결하고 높은 확장성을 제공할 수 있는 기술이다. NoC를 이용한 설계는 많은 수의 IP들과 통신 네트워크들을 사용하기 때문에 동작이 복잡하고 설계 공간이 커서 많은 전력을 소모 한다. 그러나 기존의 분석적인 방법은 NoC응용의 큰 설계 공간 및 동작의 복잡성에 비해 상대적으로 간소화된 모델을 사용하여 현실적인 설계요소를 반영하지 못하거나 복잡한 시뮬레이션에 따른 많은 노력 및 시간 요구로 사용에 많은 제약이 있었다. 따라서 본 논문에서는 현실적이고 정확한 NoC의 전력 소모 분석을 위해 FPGA 프로토타입(prototype)을 개발하고 이에 대한 전력 소모를 분석을 할 수 있는 싸이클별 전력 소모 측정 기법 및 도구를 소개한다. 또한 사례 연구로서 NoC기술을 이용한 JPEG 압축기를 구현하고 이에 대한 전력 소모를 분석하여 그 효용성을 입증한다.

Keywords

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