Integrated Data Relocation and Bus Reconfiguration for Adaptive System-on-Chip Platforms

Dynamic variations in application functionality and performance requirements can lead to the imposition of widely disparate requirements on system-on-chip (SoC) platform hardware over time. This has led to interest in the design and use of adaptive SoC platforms that are capable of providing high performance in the face of such variations. Recent advances in circuits and architectures are enabling platforms that contain various mechanisms for runtime adaptation. However, the problem of exploiting such configurability in a coordinated manner at the system level remains a challenging task. In this work, we focus on two configurable subsystems of SoC platforms that play a crucial role in determining overall system performance, namely, the on-chip communication architecture, and the on-chip memory architecture. Using detailed case studies, we demonstrate the limitations of designs in which the architectural configuration of a bus-based communication architecture and the placement of data in memory are statically optimized, and those in which each is customized separately, without considering their interdependence. We propose an integrated methodology for dynamically relocating on-chip data and reconfiguring the communication architecture, and discuss the necessary hardware support. Experiments conducted on an SoC platform that integrates decoders for the UMTS (3G) and IEEE 802.11a (wireless LAN) standards demonstrate that the proposed integrated adaptation technique helps boost the maximum achievable performance by up to 32% over the best statically optimized design