Abstract: As a result of semiconductor
technology scaling persisting over the
last five decades, chip designers are
today faced with the task of managing
over a billion on-chip transistors. With
feature sizes of no more than a few
tens of nanometers in contemporary
technologies, several undesirable
phenomena at such nanoscale
geometries have significantly
complicated System-on-Chip (SoC)
design. These phenomena include: (i)
an increased influence of process
variations that has introduced
considerable unpredictability in circuit-
behavior; (ii) a lowering of the critical
charge of logic- and memory-cells
that has given rise to elevated levels
of soft-errors; (iii) a steep rise in
power-densities due to higher
transistor-densities, that has
introduced the problem of dark-
silicon, where a significant portion of
the chip is required to be shut down at
any given time; (iv) circuit aging that
has increased significantly because of
higher severity of aging factors such
as electromigration and bias
temperature instability (BTI) in circuits
fabricated in advanced technology
nodes; and (v) high voltage drops in
the power delivery network (PDN) that
have worsened due to the shrinking
widths of on-chip interconnects.
Additionally, even though the design
complexity has risen exponentially,
the time-to-market window for design
companies has not changed
markedly. Despite the numerous
daunting challenges faced by the
semiconductor design community,
each new generation of SoCs are
expected to meet higher and higher
performance demands. Therefore,
there is an urgent need for holistic
automated system-level design tools
that produce feasible and optimized
design solutions efficiently while
satisfying application and platform
constraints.
As a lot more transistors become
available to designers with every new
technology node, we are witnessing a
trend of increasing number of
processing cores on the
semiconductor die. With tens to
hundreds of cores being integrated on
emerging multicore SoCs, network-
on-chip (NoC) based communication
architectures have been found to be
more suitable compared to the
traditional bus-based communication
architectures. Also, the recently
evolved paradigm of 3D stacking of
ICs has opened up new avenues for
extracting higher performance from
future systems by stacking multiple
layers of cores and memory. In this
thesis, we propose design-time
optimization frameworks for synthesis
of 2D and 3D NoC-based multicore
SoCs. We present novel algorithms
and heuristics for application-
mapping, voltage-island partitioning,
and NoC routing path allocation to
optimize metrics such as
communication and computation
power and energy, chip-cooling
power, voltage-drops in the PDN,
design-yield, and energy-delay-
squared product (ED2P), while
satisfying temperature, PDN, and
performance constraints. In addition,
to address the critical need for
system-level solutions that can
simultaneously and adaptively
manage the constraints imposed by
dark silicon, process variations, soft-
error reliability, and lifetime reliability,
we propose run-time frameworks for
OS-level adaptations based on the
circuit-level characteristics of
multicore SoCs. Experimental results
show that the techniques proposed in
this thesis produce design solutions
that provide much better overall
optimality while considering multiple
optimization metrics pertinent to
modern semiconductor design.
Publications: • N. Kapadia, S. Pasricha, “VISION: A Framework for Voltage Island Aware Synthesis of Interconnection Networks-on-Chipâ€, ACM Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI (GLSVLSI) 2011, May 2011.
• N. Kapadia, S. Pasricha, “A Power Delivery Network Aware Framework for Synthesis of 3D Networks-on-Chip with Multiple Voltage Islandsâ€, IEEE International Conference on VLSI Design (VLSID), January 2012.
• N. Kapadia, S. Pasricha, “A Framework for Low Power Synthesis of Interconnection Networks-on-Chip with Multiple Voltage Islandsâ€, Integration, the VLSI Journal, June 2012.
• N. Kapadia, S. Pasricha, “VERVE: A Framework for Variation-Aware Energy Efficient Synthesis of NoC-based MPSoCs with Voltage islandsâ€, IEEE International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design (ISQED), March 2013.
• N. Kapadia, S. Pasricha, “A Co-Synthesis Methodology for Power Delivery and Data Interconnection Networks in 3D ICsâ€, IEEE International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design (ISQED), March 2013.
• N. Kapadia, S. Pasricha, “Process Variation Aware Synthesis of Application-Specific MPSoCs to Maximize Yieldâ€, IEEE International Conference on VLSI Design (VLSID), January 2014.
• N. Kapadia, S. Pasricha, “PRATHAM: A Power Delivery-Aware and Thermal-Aware Mapping Framework for Parallel Embedded Applications on 3D MPSoCs", IEEE International Conference on Computer Design (ICCD), October 2014.
• N. Kapadia, S. Pasricha, “VARSHA: Variation and Reliability-Aware Application Scheduling with Adaptive Parallelism in the Dark-Silicon Era", Design Automation and Test in Europe (DATE) conference, March 2015.
• N. Kapadia, S. Pasricha, “A System-Level Co-Synthesis Framework for Power Delivery and On-chip Data Networks in Application-Specific 3D ICs" IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration Systems (TVLSI), February 2015.
• N. Kapadia, S. Pasricha, “ARTEMIS: An Aging-Aware Run-Time Resource Management Framework for 3D CMPs in the Dark-Silicon Eraâ€, under review.
Program of Study: ECE 661 ECE 658 N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
