Chameleon: Adaptive energy-efficient heterogeneous network-on-chip

Multi-NoC (multiple network-on-chip) has demonstrated its advantages in power gating for reducing leakage power. This work presents Chameleon, a novel heterogeneous Multi-NoC design. Chameleon employs a fine-grained power gating algorithm which exploits power saving opportunities at different levels of granularity simultaneously. Integrated with a performance-aware traffic allocation policy, Chameleon is able to achieve both high power efficiency and good performance at varying network utilization. Our experimental results show that Chameleon delivers an average of 3.39% higher performance than Catnap, the best in the literature. More importantly, Chameleon consumes an average of 17.16% less power than Catnap.