A Unique Low Power Network-an-Chip Virtual Channel Router

IP cores on a chip have been drastically increasing with technology scaling. Integration of these cores on a single chip has been a challenge and Network on Chip (NoC) is the cognitive solution to this due to its faster data transmission, smaller area and lower power consumption. Routers constitute a significant part of NoC. It is imperative to design a router that is area and power efficient. The proposed router utilizes the concept of acyclic sorting operation, which replaces the cyclic round robin arbitration to obtain a low power network on chip router architecture, and this architecture is described in detail in this paper. This design achieves 18.03% decrease in area and 24.27% decrease in power with a marginal 16.41 % increase in delay when compared with the Shield router architecture.