Energy-Efficient Multicore Chip Design through Cross-Layer Approach
Paul Wettin, Jacob Murray, Partha Pratim Pande, Behrooz Shirazi, Amlan Ganguly · 2013
Traditional multi-core designs, based on the Network-on-Chip (NoC) paradigm, suffer from high latency and power dissipation as the system size scales up due to the inherent multi-hop nature of communication. Introducing long-range, low power, and high-bandwidth, single-hop links between far apart cores can significantly enhance the performance of NoC fabrics. In this paper, we propose design of a small-world network based NoC architecture with on-chip millimeter (mm)-wave wireless links. The millimeter wave small-world NoC (mSWNoC) is capable of improving the overall latency and energy dissipation characteristics compared to the conventional mesh-based counterpart. The mSWNoC helps in improving the energy dissipation, and hence the thermal profile, even further in presence of network-level dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) without incurring any additional latency penalty.