Power and clock gating modelling in coarse grained reconfigurable systems

Abstract

Power reduction is one of the biggest challenges in modern systems and tends to become a severe issue dealing with complex scenarios. To provide high-performance and flexibility, designers often opt for coarse-grained reconfigurable (CGR) systems. Nevertheless, these systems require specific attention to the power problem, since large set of resources may be underutilized while computing a certain task. This paper focuses on this issue. Targeting CGR devices, we propose a way to model in advance power and clock gating costs on the basis of the functional, technological and architectural parameters of the baseline CGR system. The proposed flow guides designers towards optimal implementations, saving designer effort and time.