ARMO

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• ARMO
• MIT Arvind, Krste Asanovic, Anantha Chandrakasan
• Nokia Gopal Raghavan, Jamey Hicks, John Ankcorn

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Three Interrelated Approaches

• Bluespec for architectural exploration and to
  design reusable components
• Arvind
• SMASH, a system simulation framework, enabling
  composition of Bluespec, SystemC, ... Modules
• Krste Asanovic
• Subthreshold-logic for lowest possible power
  consumption
• Anantha Chandrakasan

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HW/SW Tradeoff
Model of System
Late binding
SW
HW

• Low Power
• High performance
• Cheaper

• Power hungry
• Low performance
• Accommodates last minute changes

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Real power saving implies specialized hardware

• H.264 implementations in software vs hardware,
• the power/energy savings could be 100 to 1000
  fold
• 125 uW in HW Vs 350 mW in SW

• But our mind set is that hardware design is
• Difficult, risky
• Increased time-to-market
• Inflexible, brittle, error prone, ...
• How to deal with changing standards, errors

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SoC Trajectorymore application specific blocks
Can we rapidly produce high-quality chips and
surrounding systems and software?
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SMASH A full-system simulation framework
Krste Asanovic

• Decoupled Transactor units
• Units in C/Bluespec/Verilog
• Can be moved to RAMP FPGA emulation environment
  or multicore simulation host

Local RTL Design-Space Exploration using Bluespec
Back-End Design Flow Final Silicon
Use Scenario
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Ultra Low Energy Video Decoding

• Goal ASIC Implementation of energy-efficient
  H.264 decoder in Texas Instruments
  next-generation CMOS process
• Aggressive energy management techniques
• Mapping of algorithm to reduce number of
  operations and memory accesses
• Extreme voltage scaling to reduce energy of
  operations (down to 300 mV !)
• Define next generation video codec (H.265)

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Two Applications

• Multiradio OFDM
• 802.11a Transmitter
• 802.11a Receiver
• Extending it to WiMax (802.16)
• H.264 Decoder
• Baseline profile, 720p X 65 frames
• FPGA implementation working
• Further power savings through ULV operation
• MIT-Nokia-Texas Instrument workshop on power
  saving and algorithmic exploration for H.265 was
  held in Fall 2006

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OFDM
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OFDM Synthesis Results
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H.264
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H.264 Synthesis Results
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H.264 Energy Consumption