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Power Signal Processing |
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To address the productivity bottlenecks in power analysis and optimization of modern systems, we propose to treat power as a signal and leverage the rich set of signal processing techniques. We first investigate the power signal properties of digital systems and analyze their limitations. We then study signal processing techniques for detecting temporal and structural correlations of power signals. Finally, we employ these techniques to accelerate the simulation of an architecture-level power simulator. Our study shows that cycle-accurate at a system level is not necessary for many design tasks, such as power management and simulation. First, a well designed power supply network with decoupling capacitance will suppress cycle-accurate current so that it can not be detected accurately. Second, simulation-based power traces are highly predictable. Our accelerating 100X in SPEC2K benchmarks motivates a power simulator being able to support various tradeoffs between resolutions and speeds is more desirable. Power signal processing readily supplies basic techniques for such a simulator. Beyond accelerating power simulation, future applications of power signal processing can lead to tools that automatically analyze massive power data, detect undesirable power behavior for higher resolution simulation, and identify suspicious system components and behaviors. We believe power signal processing provide a new perspective into automatic power analysis and optimization that will help address the productivity bottlenecks in power analysis and optimization of large electronic systems. The following paper summarizes our most recent effort:
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