Dynamic platform management for configurable platform-based System-on-Chips

General-purpose System-on-Chip platforms consisting of configurable components are emerging as an attractive alternative to traditional, customized solutions (e.g., ASICs, custom SoCs), owing to their flexibility, time-to-market advantage, and low engineering costs. However, the adoption of such platforms in many high-volume markets (e.g. wireless handhelds) is limited by concerns about their performance and energy-efficiency. This paper addresses the problem of enabling the use of configurable platforms in domains where custom approaches have traditionally been used. We introduce Dynamic Platform Management, a methodology for customizing a configurable general-purpose platform at run-time, to help bridge the performance and energy efficiency gap with custom approaches. The proposed technique uses a software layer that detects time-varying processing requirements imposed by a set of applications, and dynamically optimizes architectural parameters and platform components. Dynamic platform management enables superior application performance, more efficient utilization of platform resources, and improved energy efficiency, as compared to a statically optimized platform, without requiring any modifications to the underlying hardware. We illustrate dynamic platform management by applying it to the design of a dual-access UMTS/WLAN security processing system, implemented on a general-purpose configurable platform. Experiments demonstrate that, compared to a statically optimized design (on the same platform), the proposed techniques enable upto 33% improvements in security processing throughput, while achieving 59% savings in energy consumption (on average).