FPGA Prototype Design of Dynamic Frequency Scaling System for Low Power SoC

Hardware based dynamic voltage and frequency scaling is a promising technique to reduce power consumption in a globally asynchronous locally synchronous system such as a homogeneous or heterogeneous multi-core system. In this paper, FPGA prototype design of hardware based dynamic frequency scaling is proposed. The proposed techniques are applied to a FIFO based multi-core system for a software defined radio and Network-on-Chip based hardware MPEG2 encoder. Compared with a references system using a single global clock, the first prototype design reduces the power consumption by 78%, but decreases the performance by 5.9%. The second prototype design shows that power consumption decreases by 29.1% while performance decreases by 0.36%.