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 systems on chip (SoCs) necessitates a rethinking of power management (PM) strategies. To overcome the scalability shortcomings of current methods, we propose BlitzCoin, a fully decentralized hardware-based PM coupled with optimized unified voltage and frequency regulation. We evaluated BlitzCoin through register transfer-level 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 PM 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 PM strategies.