A Systematic Design Methodology for Low-Power NoCs

Network-on-chip (NoC) communication architectures are emerging as the most scalable and efficient solution to handle on-chip communication challenges in the multicore era. In NoCs, power estimations in the early stages of the design help the designers to optimize the design for energy consumption and efficiently map applications to achieve low-power solutions. However, in 90-nm designs or below, the impact of parasitics not only influence timing closure, but also leads to variability in power and area budgets among different NoC architectures. There is a growing need for advanced design methodologies to overcome these issues in NoC designs. This paper presents a system-level design methodology based on layout and power models to achieve low-power and high-performance NoC designs. The impact of global interconnects with and without repeater insertion on the bandwidth and power is considered. Width and spacing of global interconnects and its effect on performance and power dissipation are analyzed. For architectural-level power analysis, different router designs for Chip-Level Integration of Communicating Heterogeneous Elements (CLICHE), Butterfly Fat Tree (BFT), Scalable, Programmable, Integrated Network (SPIN), and Octagon NoC architectures are implemented using ARMs 65-nm standard cell library in 65-nm Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC) process. The router designs are synthesized in RVT process using a ${V}_{\rm dd}$ of 1.0 V and a temperature of 25$^{\circ}{\rm C}$ . Synopsys Prime Time-PX design tool is used for calculating average power dissipation of the router designs.