Power Domain Management Interface: Flexible Protocol Interface for Transaction-Level Power Domain Management
Résumé
Defining a power management solution for a system-on-chip imposes the design of a low power architecture composed
of multiple power domains and a power management strategy for power domain state control. If these two elements are energyefficient,an energy-efficient power management solution can be obtained. Transaction-level of modelling allows a rapid exploration of different power management solutions, hence a fast decision-making of the most energy-efficient one. The authors’ previous work proposed an abstraction of the unified power format (UPF) standard semantics to enable fast
evaluation of different UPF-like power architectures at transaction-level (TL). However, a fast evaluation of different power
domain management strategies requires a unique and flexible hardware interface to organise transfers of inter-power-domain transactions according to a well-defined protocol. The proposal of a new hardware protocol interface for power domain state management, called power domain management interface (PDMgIF), and its TL simulation model represents the main contribution of this study. This proposal separates functional and power management communications. It represents a potential extension of existing low power standards (such as UPF) that already miss power domain management semantics.The PDMgIF concepts are demonstrated through an audio application TL platform illustrating a high flexibility and reduced;overhead of the TL PDMgIF model.
Mots clés
power domain management semantics
power domain management interface
functional management communications
power domain state control
hardware protocol interface
audio application TL platform
interpower-domain transactions
flexible protocol interface
transaction-level power domain management
power management communications
TL PDMgIF model
low power architecture design
UPF standard semantics
energy-efficient power management solution
flexible hardware interface
protocols
: low-power electronics
power aware computing
system-on-chip
decision making
integrated circuit design
integrated circuit modelling
TL simulation model
UPF-like power architectures
power management strategy
unified power format standard semantics