Supply voltage selection in Voltage Island based SoC design

Voltage Island design is one of the most popular techniques for energy efficient system-on-chip (SoC) designs. We propose a new cost function for voltage selection that incorporates information about the connectivity among cores, and investigate its benefits when applied early in the voltage island design process. Additionally, certain placement constraints are applied to island formation to provide more realistic scenarios in SoC design. Experimental results show that, using the new cost function, we can achieve on average 7% power reduction and 1-4% area reduction compared to previous work.