X-OPM: Explainable Automatic Digital On-Chip Power Modeling for Enhanced Robustness

Proactive power management systems reduce processor dynamic power through runtime power prediction and power-aware scheduling. Accurate, stable and low-overhead digital on-chip power meters (OPMs) are crucial for improving the prediction quality. Recent studies have explored various modeling methods, including using linear models, decision trees, and multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) to construct OPMs. However, most current approaches train models end-to-end without analyzing the physical interpretability of features, affecting their ability to generalize to unseen workloads. Grounded in the design principles of synchronous digital VLSI circuits, X-OPM introduces a robust feature engineering framework that uses tree-based models to capture feature interactions and linear models for prediction. It also incorporates a human-in-the-loop workflow to balance model accuracy against modeling effort. Evaluated on a commercial C906 vector processor, X-OPM consistently achieves R2 > 0.93 across all workloads with sampling window size set below 8 cycles. In contrast, state-of-the-art methods including APOLLO, COBIT, and standard MLPs fail to generalize across all test cases. Layout with commercial EDA tools shows that X-OPM incurs an area overhead below 0.1%, which is on par with lightweight tree-based and linear models, and significantly smaller than MLP-based models.