Plug-in of Power Models in the StepNP Exploration Platform: Analysis of Power/Performance Trade-offs

In this paper, we propose a power/performance estimation layer designed for StepNP, a system-level architecture simulation and exploration platform for Network Processors and Multi-Processor Systems-on-Chip (MP-SoCs). The first goal of our work is to plug-in PIRATE, a parameterizable Network on-Chip in the StepNP platform, to support a fast exploration of on-chip interconnection networks. Up to now, StepNP does not provide any energy profiling, so our second goal is to dynamically plug-in power models of the different system components to provide power estimates quickly. The proposed power/performance exploration framework is based on a power characterization methodology and a system- level simulator to dynamically profile the given network application. This framework is intended to be used at different levels of the design, considering several levels of accuracy and taking full advantage of the StepNP performance profiling features. Experimental results are provided for the exploration of an ARM-based MP-SOC including a configurable NoC-IP executing an IPv4 forwarding application