Energy Efficient Synchronous - Asynchronous Circuit-Switched NoC
Sandy A. Wasif, Salma Hesham, Diana Göhringer, Klaus Hofmann, Mohamed A. Abd El Ghany · 2020
The advancement in technology has led to the integration of multiple cores onto a single chip, calling for new means of on-chip communication substituting the simple physical wires. Networks-on-Chip (NoCs) were introduced as the emerging solution for a high performance and scalable communication infrastructure in the multi-core platforms. However, with the increasing chip complexity heading to thousand cores, NoCs are significantly contributing in the chip power consumption. This paper presents the energy efficient sync-async Circuit-switched NoC (CS-NoC) with a synchronous control sub-router and an asynchronous data transfer subrouter. CS was chosen to benefit from the fact that CS NoC presets the data-path. The proposed NoC is synthesized using Synopsys Design Compiler for 65nm technology. The obtained results for 65nm show a reduction of 80% in the dynamic power and 7% for the leakage power as compared to pure synchronous CS-NoCs.