Integrated Asynchronous Regulation for Nanometric Technologies
Résumé
With the upcoming nanometric technologies, integrated system performances after fabrication will not be fully predictable. Indeed, the process variations really become huge at the chip scale. This implies to consider global management strategies in order to respect energetic and real-time constraints. Therefore performance estimation and management are today key points in new integrated systems. New strategies for energy management have to be used to meet the energy and real-time constraints. Solutions such as dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) have to be considered, they have been explored and have shown significant energy savings while meeting performance requirements. This paper starts with a survey on different solutions for the new problems that arise with the nanometric era. Then, it proposes an energy/performance feedback control algorithm in order to reduce the impact of process variability. Finally, a case study is shown that applies this kind of feedback control algorithm for an embedded application on deep submicron technology. The proposed performance/energy controller is shown to have strong robustness against process variability.