Godkända
Globally Asynchronous Locally Synchronous design in the CAL dataflow language
Hemanth Prabhu () och Sherine Thomas ()
Start
2010-06-01
Presentation
2011-01-24 10:15
Plats:
E:2311
Avslutat:
2011-02-09
Examensrapport:
(Kontakta handledare)
Sammanfattning
This thesis presents a method for low power hardware implementation based on CAL Actor Language (CAL), a data flow oriented high level specification. The main advantage of using data flow language in hardware implementations is the reduction in design time. The fundamental properties of actors/data ow language makes CAL a promising candidate for Globally Asynchronous Locally Synchronous (GALS) design. CAL is a data flow language developed by the University of California at Berkley. It is an open source, high level language which may be synthesized either into software or hardware. CAL data flow language has constructs, which helps in the partitioning of design. This feature can be easily adopted for implementing efficient GALS design. However, the current tools available for hardware synthesis are not efficient in generating area efficient code. As part of the thesis, the original CAL tool flow, used for FPGA implementation, is modified to become feasible for low power ASIC implementations. Furthermore, an automatic token based clock gating scheme is integrated in the flow. To evaluate performance of the flow, an Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) multi-standard channel estimator is implemented. Simulation results show that throughput of the CAL based design increases by 30%, which is due to the inherent parallelism in a data flow language. The total power consumption is reduced by 27% using the CAL flow compared to the reference implementation, and token based clock gating resulted in a total power saving of 59% compared to the reference implementation.
Handledare: Thomas Olsson (Ericsson)
Examinator: Joachim Rodrigues (EIT)