Adaptive Energy Management for Dynamically Reconfigurable Processors

We present an adaptive energy management system for dynamically reconfigurable processors that chooses an energy-minimizing set of custom instructions (CIs) and then power-gates the temporarily unused subset of CIs. It requires a comprehensive power model to estimate the power consumption of different CIs at run time. We deploy our new energy management in two state-of-the-art reconfigurable processors (RISPP and Molen) and perform an elaborative evaluation of energy savings under various area and performance constraints for different technology nodes. We demonstrate the energy benefits by comparing it to state-of-the-art power-gating techniques for FPGAs. The work is implemented as a prototype on a Xilinx FPGA platform.