BlitzCoin: A Decentralized Hardware Solution for Power Management of Highly Heterogeneous Systems on Chip

The increase in both the number and the types of accelerators in modern SoCs necessitates a rethinking of power-management strategies. To overcome the scalability shortcomings of current methods, we propose BlitzCoin a fully decentralized hardware-based power management coupled with optimized unified voltage and frequency regulation. We evaluated BlitzCoin through RTL simulations of multiple SoCs targeted toward different application domains. The results are further validated through silicon measurements of a fabricated 12 nm many-accelerator SoC that includes BlitzCoin. Our evaluations show that BlitzCoin is markedly faster than state-of-the-art centralized power-management strategies, with 8× to 12× lower response times. This results in 25%-34% throughput improvement and allows for scaling to 7× to 13× larger SoCs, all with a small area overhead of <1%. BlitzCoin is an addition to the open-source ESP SoC platform, offering a foundation for further exploration of power-management strategies.