• 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.

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.16 no.6
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• pp.832-841
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• 2016

The voltage-frequency island (VFI) design paradigm has strong potential for achieving high energy efficiency in communication centric manycore system-on-chip (SoC) design called network-on-chip (NoC). However, because of the diminished scaling of wire-dimension and supply voltage as well as threshold voltage in modern CMOS technology, the vulnerability to link failure in VFI NoC is becoming a crucial challenge. In this paper, we propose an energy-optimized topology generation technique for VFI NoC to cope with permanent link failures. Based on the energy consumption model, we exploit the on-chip communication traffic patterns and characteristics of link failures in the early design stage to accommodate diverse applications and architectures. Experimental results using a number of multimedia application benchmarks show the effectiveness of the proposed three-step custom topology generation method in terms of energy consumption and latency without any degradation in the fault coverage metric.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.53 no.8
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• pp.66-75
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• 2016

Due to aggressive scaling of device sizes and reduced noise margins, physical defects caused by aging and process variation are continuously increasing. Additionally, with scaling limitation of metal wire and the increasing of communication volume, fault tolerant method in manycore network-on-chip (NoC) has been actively researched. However, there are few researches investigating reliability in NoC with voltage-frequency-island (VFI) regime. In this paper, we propose a table-based routing technique that can communicate, even if link failures occur in the VFI NoC. The output port is alternatively selected between best and the detour routing path in order to improve reliability with minimized hardware cost. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves full coverage within 1% faulty links. Compared to $d^2$-LBDR that also considers a routing method for searching a detour path in real time, the proposed method, on average, produces 0.8% savings in execution time and 15.9% savings in energy consumption.