Racetrack Queues for Extremely Low-Energy FIFOs

Networks-on-chip (NoCs) have become a leading energy consumer in modern multicore processors, with a considerable portion of this energy originating from the large number of virtual channel first-in-first-out (FIFO) buffers. Given this motivation, we propose control schemes that leverage the “shift-register” nature of spintronic domain-wall memory (DWM) to create extremely low-energy FIFO queues. In order to test these queues in the most relevant application context, replacing conventional memory buffers for NoCs, we perform design-space analysis over the different schemes in a network context and then analyze the best schemes with benchmark traffic. Our results indicate that the best shift-based buffer utilizes a dual-nanowire approach to ensure that reads and writes can be more effectively aligned with access ports for simultaneous access in the same cycle. Our approach provides a 2.93× speedup over a DWM buffer using a traditional FIFO memory control scheme with a 23.4% savings in energy. The resulting approach achieves a 39% reduction in energy-delay product compared to SRAM and a 24% reduction in energy-delay product versus spin-transfer torque magnetic memories.