Improving energy consumption of NoC based architectures through approximate communication

This paper presents an approximate communication technique aimed at improving the energy efficiency of Network-on-Chip (NoC) based architectures. The basic idea is a selective adjustment, at run-time, of the voltage swing of the links of the NoC to obtain a trade-off between the communication energy consumption and the accuracy of the running application. The proposed technique is applied to a case study, namely, a JPEG encoder resulting in an energy saving up to 70% with a negligible impact on the quality of the compressed image.