KAPow: A System Identification Approach to Online Per-Module Power Estimation in FPGA Designs
File(s)
Accepted version
Author(s)
Type
Conference Paper
Abstract
In a modern FPGA system-on-chip design, it is often insufficient to simply assess the total power consumption of the entire circuit by design-time estimation or runtime power rail measurement. Instead, to make better runtime decisions, it is desirable to understand the power consumed by each individual module in the system. In this work, we combine board-level power measurements with register-level activity counting to build an online model that produces a breakdown of power consumption within the design. Online model refinement avoids the need for a time-consuming characterisation stage and also allows the model to track long-term changes to operating conditions. Our flow is named KAPow, a (loose) acronym for 'K'ounting Activity for Power estimation, which we show to be accurate, with per-module power estimates as close to +/-5mW of true measurements, and to have low overheads. We also demonstrate an application example in which a per-module power breakdown can be used to determine an efficient mapping of tasks to modules and reduce system-wide power consumption by over 8%.
Date Issued
2016-08-18
Date Acceptance
2016-03-01
Citation
2016, pp.56-63
ISBN
978-1-5090-2356-1
Publisher
IEEE
Start Page
56
End Page
63
Journal / Book Title
Proceedings of the 2016 IEEE 24th Annual International Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines (FCCM)
Copyright Statement
© 2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
Sponsor
Engineering & Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC)
Engineering & Physical Science Research Council (E
Royal Academy Of Engineering
Imagination Technologies Ltd
Identifier
http://cas.ee.ic.ac.uk/people/gac1/pubs/EddieFCCM16.pdf
Grant Number
EP/I020357/1
11908 (EP/K034448/1)
Prof Constantinides Chair
Prof Constantinides Chair
Source
IEEE Symposium on Field-programmable Custom Computing Machines (FCCM) 2016
Publication Status
Published
Start Date
2016-05-01
Finish Date
2016-05-03
Coverage Spatial
Washington, DC, USA
Date Publish Online
2016-08-18