SoC Concurrent Clock Scheduling Management Intended For Shared Resource Conflicts

With the progress of integrated circuits (IC), low power consumption has become a key consideration in IC design. System power consumption mainly consists of dynamic and static power consumption, in which the dynamic part plays a dominant role under the current process. To tackle the problem of dynamic power consumption, much research has been done at home and abroad. However, with the development of multicore SoC (System-on-Chip), new problems regarding power consumption have emerged while multicore processors show their advantages. The multi-task concurrency in SoC causes more frequent competition on shared resources like bus and main memory. Competition results in task waiting, which further leads to unnecessary power loss. Therefore, how to reduce the power consumption caused by resource conflicts while meeting peak power requirements of the system has become a major challenge in system-level clock management.In this paper, a system-level SoC clock scheduling management technique is purposed to achieve optimal total power consumption under the peak power constraint. Without any impact on system performance, the technique calculates the waiting time of each unit caused by resource conflicts according to their competition probabilities on shared resources, and further analyzes the effective working time of each task as the finishing time of tasks is known. The target is then reached by using software to deploy the clock frequency of each unit to schedule shared resource access.The experimental platform of this project is built on C-SKY SoC. MATLAB is utilized to carry out optimization computing, and Power Compiler is used to conduct power analysis on experimental results. Experimental results show that with this technique total power consumption can be reduced by at least3.3%and up to38.2%. This work has practical significance to clock scheduling aimed at dealing with shared resource conflicts of SoC system.