Energy efficient hardware-software co-synthesis using reconfigurable hardware

• Main Author: Ou, Jingzhao
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Subjects: engineering, electronics and electrical
• ISBN: 9780542912146; 0542912147

With reconfigurable hardware widely adopted by many complicated embedded systems, energy efficient application development using reconfigurable hardware has become very challenging. This thesis makes the following four major contributions.
First of all, a high-level hardware-software co-development framework is proposed. Rapid hardware-software development and co-simulation can be performed within the high-level framework.
An energy performance modeling technique is proposed which can capture the energy dissipation behavior and energy management techniques of the various hardware components available on modern reconfigurable hardware. Then, based on these high-level energy performance models, a dynamic programming based optimization algorithm is proposed to minimize the energy dissipation of the system.
By utilizing the simulation results obtained from the high-level co-development framework, a two-step high-level energy estimation is proposed. On the one hand, we employ an instruction-level energy estimation technique to estimate the energy dissipation of the software programs running on processors. On the other hand, a domain-specific modeling technique is used to estimate the energy dissipation of the customized hardware peripherals attached to the processor.
A Cooperative MAnagement (COMA) technique is proposed for energy efficient implementation of real-time OS using reconfigurable hardware. A hardware peripheral for power management is attached to the processor and manages the operating states of the various hardware components (including the processor) based on the execution status of the operating system.