POSTER: Fly-Over: A light-weight distributed power-gating mechanism for energy-efficient networks-on-chip

Reducing static NoC power consumption is becoming critical for energy-efficient computing as technology scales down since NoCs are devouring a large fraction of the on-chip power budget. We propose Fly-Over (FLOV), a light-weight distributed mechanism for power-gating routers. With simple modifications to the baseline router architecture, FLOV links are facilitated over power-gated routers. A Handshake protocol that allows seamless router power-gating in addition to a dynamic routing algorithm, that provides best-effort minimal path without the necessity for global network information, maintain normal NoC functionality. We evaluate our schemes using synthetic workloads as well as real workloads from PARSEC 2.1 benchmark suite. The results show that FLOV can achieve on average 19.2% latency reduction and 15.9% total energy savings.