• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
• /
• v.40 no.5
• /
• pp.321-334
• /
• 2003

Globally-Asynchronous Locally-Synchronous (GALS) systems are worthy of notice as an adequate architecture for a large scaled chip design with guaranteeing easy designs and functional confidence. In this paper, we suggest an advanced structure of the interface unit which is indispensable for GALS systems by using stoppable clocks. The proposed interface unit is composed of a sender module and a receiver module. The sender module can carry out data transmission partially without the relation to an internal clock. We have designed it with 0.25${\mu}{\textrm}{m}$ standard cell library at the gate level and simulated its operation to show performance improvement. Finally, we constructed all example circuit with the interface unit and proved the correct operation of it.

• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
• /
• v.15 no.11
• /
• pp.801-805
• /
• 2009

Hardware based dynamic voltage and frequency scaling is a promising technique to reduce power consumption in a globally asynchronous locally synchronous system such as a homogeneous or heterogeneous multi-core system. In this paper, FPGA prototype design of hardware based dynamic frequency scaling is proposed. The proposed techniques are applied to a FIFO based multi-core system for a software defined radio and Network-on-Chip based hardware MPEG2 encoder. Compared with a references system using a single global clock, the first prototype design reduces the power consumption by 78%, but decreases the performance by 5.9%. The second prototype design shows that power consumption decreases by 29.1% while performance decreases by 0.36%.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
• /
• v.46 no.8
• /
• pp.22-30
• /
• 2009

Due to high levels of integration and complexity, the Network-on-Chip (NoC) approach has emerged as a new design paradigm to overcome on-chip communication issues and data bandwidth limits in conventional SoC(System-on-Chip) design. In particular, exponentially growing of energy consumption caused by high frequency, synchronization and distributing a single global clock signal throughout the chip have become major design bottlenecks. To deal with these issues, a globally asynchronous, locally synchronous (GALS) design combined with low power techniques is considered. Such a design style fits nicely with the concept of voltage-frequency-islands (VFI) which has been recently introduced for achieving fine-grain system-level power management. In this paper, we propose an efficient design methodology that minimizes energy consumption by VFI partitioning on an NoC architecture as well as assigning supply and threshold voltage levels to each VFI. The proposed algorithm which find VFI and appropriate core (or processing element) supply voltage consists of traffic-aware core graph partitioning, communication contention delay-aware tile mapping, power variation-aware core dynamic voltage scaling (DVS), power efficient VFI merging and voltage update on the VFIs Simulation results show that average 10.3% improvement in energy consumption compared to other existing works.