• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.53 no.8
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• pp.49-58
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• 2016

In designing heterogeneous architecture based application-specific network-on-chips (NoCs), the opportunities of performance improvement would be expanded when applying asynchronous on-chip communication protocol. This is because the wire latency can be configured independently considering the wirelength of each link. In this paper, we develop the delay model of link-wire-length in asynchronous NoC and propose simulated annealing (SA) based floorplan-aware topology generation algorithm to optimize link-wirelengths. Incorporating the generated topology and the associated latency values across all links, we evaluate the performance using the floorplan-annotated sdf (standard delay format) file and RTL-synthesized gate-level netlist. Compared to TopGen, one of general topology generation algorithms, the experimental results show the reduction in latency by 13.7% and in execution time by 11.8% in average with regards to four applications.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.46 no.8
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• pp.22-30
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• 2009

Due to high levels of integration and complexity, the Network-on-Chip (NoC) approach has emerged as a new design paradigm to overcome on-chip communication issues and data bandwidth limits in conventional SoC(System-on-Chip) design. In particular, exponentially growing of energy consumption caused by high frequency, synchronization and distributing a single global clock signal throughout the chip have become major design bottlenecks. To deal with these issues, a globally asynchronous, locally synchronous (GALS) design combined with low power techniques is considered. Such a design style fits nicely with the concept of voltage-frequency-islands (VFI) which has been recently introduced for achieving fine-grain system-level power management. In this paper, we propose an efficient design methodology that minimizes energy consumption by VFI partitioning on an NoC architecture as well as assigning supply and threshold voltage levels to each VFI. The proposed algorithm which find VFI and appropriate core (or processing element) supply voltage consists of traffic-aware core graph partitioning, communication contention delay-aware tile mapping, power variation-aware core dynamic voltage scaling (DVS), power efficient VFI merging and voltage update on the VFIs Simulation results show that average 10.3% improvement in energy consumption compared to other existing works.