ACM Transaction of Embedded Computing Systems (TECS) recently informed us that our article “Maximizing the Number of Good Dies for Streaming Applications in NoC-based MPSoCs under Process Variation” has been accepted for publication. This work nicely summarizes the dissertation of Davit Mirzoyan from his four year PhD studies at Delft University of Technology under the supervision of Kees Goossens and myself.
The article addresses design of real-time systems for streaming applications constrained by a throughput requirement with reduced design margins, referred to as better than worst-case design. The first contribution is a complete modeling framework that captures a streaming application mapped to a NoC-based multiprocessor system with voltage-frequency islands under process-induced die-to-die and within-die frequency variations. The framework is used to analyze the impact of variations in the frequency of hardware components on application throughput at the system level. The second contribution is a methodology to use the proposed framework and estimate the impact of reducing circuit design margins on the number of good dies that satisfy the throughput requirement of a real-time streaming application. It is shown on both synthetic and real applications that the proposed design approach can increase the number of good dies by up to 9.6% and 18.8% for designs with and without fixed SRAM and IO blocks, respectively.