Supply voltage emulation platform for DVFS voltage drop compensation explorations

The supply voltage level has emerged as an important metric alongside power consumption information to investigate system stability and reliability issues. In this paper, we propose a supply voltage emulation platform based on a power emulation approach to derive real-time power and supply voltage information from a system. Moreover, we present a dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) based voltage drop compensation scheme to maintain stable system operation. The early design phase applicability of our emulation-based approach enables the investigation of the effectiveness of voltage drop compensation schemes before the final chip is available.