As SoC (System-on-Chip) complexity continues to increase, function/performance verification is required in the middle of design process (before tape-out) to reduce the possible risks ranging from over-design to non-compliance with the design specifications. In this paper, we propose a seamless SoC verification. The proposed methodology exploits a modern virtual platform (VP) technology which can combine high-level C++ firmware, timing-accurate SystemC models, and RTL (register-transfer level) designs. Thus, the full-chip level verification can be done at any design stages in the whole development process. With experimental results, this paper shows the benefits and lessons of using VPs.

Cache replacement policies and cache partitioning are well-known cache management techniques which aim to eliminate inter- and intra-application contention caused by co-running applications, respectively. Since replacement policies can change applications' behavior on a shared last-level cache, they have a massive impact on cache partitioning. Furthermore, cache partitioning determines the capacity allocated to each application affecting incorporated replacement policy. However, their interoperability has not been thoroughly explored. Since existing cache partitioning methods are tailored to specific replacement policies to reduce overheads for characterization of applications' behavior, they may lead to suboptimal partitioning results when incorporated with the up-to-date replacement policies. In cache partitioning, miss curve estimation is a key component to relax this restriction which can reflect the dependency between a replacement policy and cache partitioning on partitioning decision. To tackle this issue, we propose a replacement policy adaptable miss curve estimation (RME) which estimates dynamic workload patterns according to any arbitrary replacement policy and to given applications with low overhead. In addition, RME considers asymmetry of miss latency by miss type, thus the impact of miss curve on cache partitioning can be reflected more accurately. The experimental results support the efficiency of RME and show that RME-based cache partitioning cooperated with high-performance replacement policies can minimize both inter- and intra-application interference successfully.

DRAM refresh power, which is consumed solely to preserve data, is rapidly increasing as capacity increases. A study predicts that the power will account for up to 35% of total DRAM power in the high capacity DRAM device. While various schemes were proposed to reduce the refresh power, those could not be adopted to commercial products due to cost overhead and design complexity issues. In this paper, we propose a simple refresh power saving scheme called TWW. We implement it with a much smaller amount of register size than previous works without modification on OS and DRAM controller. It eliminates unnecessary refresh operation of pre-activated rows in a specific timing window with optimum register size. We can save the refresh power up to 16% with only 6.2 KB registers in a DRAM device. This paper explains the implementation of the proposed scheme and shows the power saving effectiveness with gem5 full system simulator.

Data synchronization among multiple cores has been one of the critical issues which must be resolved in order to optimize the parallelism of multicore architectures. Data synchronization schemes can be classified as lock-based methods (“pessimistic”) and lock-free methods (“optimistic”). However, none of these methods consider the nature of embedded systems which have demanding and sometimes conflicting requirements not only for high performance, but also for low power consumption. As an answer to these problems, we propose$C\!\!- \!\! Lock$, an energy- and performance-efficient data synchronization method for multicore embedded systems.$C\!\!- \!\! Lock$achieves balanced energy- and performance-efficiency by combining the advantages of lock-based methods and transactional memory (TM) approaches; in$C\!\!- \!\! Lock$, the core is blocked only when true conflicts exist (advantage of TM), while avoiding roll-back operations which can cause huge overhead with regard to both performance and energy (this is an advantage of locks). Also, in order to save more energy,$C\!\!- \!\! Lock$disables the clocks of the cores which are blocked for the access to the shared data until the shared data become available. We compared our$C\!\!- \!\! Lock$approach against traditional locks and transactional memory systems and found that$C\!\!- \!\! Lock$can reduce the energy-delay product by up to 1.94 times and 13.78 times compared to the baseline and TM, respectively.