Compact Interleaved Thermal Control for Improving Throughput and Reliability of Networks-on-Chip
Tong Cheng, Zirui Xu, Xinyi Li, Li Li, Yuxiang Fu · 2025
Due to the scaling of sub-micron technology and the growing complexity of applications, escalating power density and traffic workloads heavily burden the network-on-chip (NoC) in multi-core systems and exacerbate thermal reliability issues. While recent thermal management techniques offer innovative solutions, they often employ the same management strategy for all tiles in NoC and activate it synchronously, which inevitably causes system oscillation and temperature cycling. In this paper, we propose a novel compact interleaved thermal control method that staggers the control phases of neighboring nodes to create negative feedback for each tile. We further explore the optimal control phase assignment by formulating it as a graph coloring problem to achieve the best performance. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method lowers the maximal spatial and temporal temperature variations up to 83.1% and 71.2% and improves the system throughput by 35.85% averagely compared with the state-of-the-art work. Besides, the proposed method can achieve a significant average enhancement of 317.50% and 234.83% in the minimal and average thermal-related mean time to failure (MTTF). Moreover, the method is scalable without extra power or area costs and is compatible with existing thermal management techniques.