• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.318-328
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• 2011

Stage-level reconfigurable chip multiprocessor (CMP) aims to achieve highly reliable and fault tolerant computing by using interwoven pipeline stages and on-chip interconnect for communicating with each other. The existing crossbar-switch based stage-level reconfigurable CMPs offer high reliability at the cost of significant area/power overheads. These overheads make realizing large CMPs prohibitive due to the area and power consumed by heavy interconnection networks. On other hand, area/power-efficient architectures offer less reliability and inefficient stage-level resource utilization. In this paper, I propose a hierarchical multiplexing interconnection structure in lieu of crossbar interconnect to design area/power-efficient stage-level reconfigurable CMP. The proposed approach is able to keep the reliability offered by the crossbar-switch while reducing the area and power overheads. Experimental results show that the proposed approach reduces area by up to 21% and power by up to 32% when compared with the crossbar-switch based interconnection network.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.30 no.4
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• pp.576-586
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• 2008

In most parallel loops of embedded applications, every iteration executes the exact same sequence of instructions while manipulating different data. This fact motivates a new compiler-hardware orchestrated execution framework in which all parallel threads share one fetch unit and one decode unit but have their own execution, memory, and write-back units. This resource sharing enables parallel threads to execute in lockstep with minimal hardware extension and compiler support. Our proposed architecture, called multithreaded lockstep execution processor (MLEP), is a compromise between the single-instruction multiple-data (SIMD) and symmetric multithreading/chip multiprocessor (SMT/CMP) solutions. The proposed approach is more favorable than a typical SIMD execution in terms of degree of parallelism, range of applicability, and code generation, and can save more power and chip area than the SMT/CMP approach without significant performance degradation. For the architecture verification, we extend a commercial 32-bit embedded core AE32000C and synthesize it on Xilinx FPGA. Compared to the original architecture, our approach is 13.5% faster with a 2-way MLEP and 33.7% faster with a 4-way MLEP in EEMBC benchmarks which are automatically parallelized by the Intel compiler.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.40 no.6
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• pp.759-773
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• 2018

Uncore components such as on-chip memory systems and on-chip interconnects consume a large amount of energy in emerging embedded applications. Few studies have focused on next-generation analytical models for future chip-multiprocessors (CMPs) that simultaneously consider the impacts of the power consumption of core and uncore components. In this paper, we propose a convex-optimization approach to design heterogeneous uncore architectures for embedded CMPs. Our convex approach optimizes the number and placement of memory banks with different technologies on the memory layer. In parallel with hybrid memory architecting, optimizing the number and placement of through silicon vias as a viable solution in building three-dimensional (3D) CMPs is another important target of the proposed approach. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms 3D CMP designs with hybrid and traditional memory architectures in terms of both energy delay products (EDPs) and performance parameters. The proposed method improves the EDPs by an average of about 43% compared with SRAM design. In addition, it improves the throughput by about 7% compared with dynamic RAM (DRAM) design.