Custom Feedback Control: Enabling truly scalable on-chip power management for MPSoCs

In this paper, we propose Custom Feedback Control, a new dynamic voltage and frequency control architecture for MP-SoC designs that bridges the gap between the two extreme points on the performance versus implementation cost trade-off curve, i.e., fully-centralized and full-decentralized control architectures. We outline a methodology to efficiently explore the vast design space of Custom Feedback control architectures, enabling designers to synthesize controllers that meet both the performance and implementation cost criteria. Our experimental results on an MPSoC platform running a video-encoding application demonstrate that, for the same energy dissipation, Custom Feedback control can achieve within 5% of the performance of a fully-centralized controller with only 17% of the implementation cost. In contrast, the performance of a fully-decentralized controller can be up to 2:5× worse than that of the fully-centralized controller.