Dynamic Platform Management for Configurable Platform-Based System-on-Chips

General-purpose System-on-Chip platforms consistingof configurable components are emerging as an attractivealternative to traditional, customized solutions (e.g., ASICs,custom SoCs), owing to their flexibility, time-to-market advantage,and low engineering costs. However, the adoptionof such platforms in many high-volume markets (e.g, wirelesshandhelds) is limited by concerns about their performance andenergy-efficiency. This paper addresses the problemof enablingthe use of configurable platforms in domains where custom approacheshave traditionally been used. We introduce DynamicPlatform Management, a methodology for customizing a configurablegeneral-purpose platform at run-time, to help bridgethe performance and energy efficiency gap with custom approaches.The proposed technique uses a software layer that detectstime-varying processing requirements imposed by a set ofapplications, and dynamically optimizes architectural parametersand platform components. Dynamic platform managementenables superior application performance, more efficient utilizationof platform resources, and improved energy efficiency,as compared to a statically optimized platform, without requiringany modifications to the underlying hardware.We illustrate dynamic platform management by applying itto the design of a dual-access UMTS/WLANsecurity processingsystem, implemented on a general-purpose configurable platform.Experiments demonstrate that, compared to a staticallyoptimized design (on the same platform), the proposed techniquesenable upto 33% improvements in security processingthroughput, while achieving 59% savings in energy consumption(on average).