Power characterization
Development of a power characterization framework for the DRRA2 fabric building on top of the DRRA1 framework
Motivation
DRRA2 has been developed as an enhancement of the DRRA CGRA fabric. Its main advantage is the ability to develop custom resources that can be integrated into both the DRRA2 hardware and the instruction set of the fabric. The next step is to develop a suitable back-end flow (physical implementation, place-and-route) so that the fabric can be generated using the building blocks without the need for additional top-level physical implementation steps. A preliminary flow is in place, and the student is expected to extend the composability concepts developed for DRRA1 and export them to DRRA2.
This thesis can be divided into multiple sub-projects, including but not limited to clock tree and timing power-grid design, among others. A single student can work independently on one of the sub-projects, or a group can be formed where multiple students work together on different projects.
Supervisor and Examiner
- Supervisor: Jordi Altayo jordiag@kth.se
- Examiner: Ahmed Hemani hemani@kth.se
Tasks
- Study and understand the DRRA2 fabric.
- Study the current flows for DRRA2.
- Propose a composition-by-abutment method for the chosen sub-topic (timing, power, etc).
- Verify and evaluate the results when compared with the standard flow.
Required Skills
- Solid understanding of digital design.
- Basics of computer architecture.
- General understanding of back-end flows using Innovus or ICC2.
- TCL and other scripting languages such as Python and Bash.