Design and analysis of multi-core homogeneous systems for energy harvesting applications

In this paper, we leverage the benefits of voltage scaling methodology for obtaining energy efficiency and compensate for the loss in throughput by exploiting parallelism present in the various DSP designs. We will show that to achieve highest level of energy efficiency, the number of cores and the operating voltages vary widely between a base designs versus a process variation aware (PVA) design. We further show that the PVA design enjoys an average of 51.1% reduction in energy consumption for scalable throughput systems. This is because the base design needs to compensate for the effects of process variation as an after fact, while the PVA is able to make suitable decisions at the time of the design. Later, we will also present details of a prototype chip which is designed to analyze process variation effects on homogeneous multi-core systems.