Power and temperature aware functional unit binding in high level synthesis. (c2011)

Abstract

This project elaborates on the possibility of optimizing the power consumed by the functional units by optimizing the functional unit binding technique. Functional unit binding maps the operations in each control step to specific functional units. However, the mapping between the operations and the available functional units has a profound effect on the power consumed. Hence, by optimizing the functional unit binding algorithm, it is possible to reduce the power consumption of the functional units which comprises a large fraction of the overall power of the design. The optimized poweraware functional unit binding methodology focus on reducing the switching activity of the functional units by minimizing the transitions of their input operands; this is done by trying to bind operations having one of its inputs remaining the same between two consecutive control steps, to the same functional unit. The second part of this project tackled temperature reduction. The same methodology used for power reduction was used for temperature reduction by optimizing the functional unit binding technique. The optimized temperature-aware functional unit binding focus on reducing the temperature of the functional units by following a parabola-like cost function; the cost is the temperature dissipated by the functional unit for every two consecutive switching at its inputs. This will lead to a change in the binding of operations to functional units giving each functional unit the time to cool down between any two successive operations.