Design of a low power NoC router using Marching Memory Through type

Power consumption of Network-on-Chip (NoC) is becoming more important in many core processors. Input buffers utilized in routers consume a significant part of the total power of NoCs. In order to reduce this power consumption, a novel power efficient memory called Marching Memory Through type (MMTH) is introduced. By connecting transparent latches in tandem, MMTH achieves high speed operation with a low power consumption. MMTH, however, requires a certain overhead at read operation, and hence we propose a latency reduction scheme based on the look-ahead routing. The proposed router was designed in Renesas's 40nm process and compared with a standard router using conventional register-based FIFOs in terms of the network performance, application performance, and power consumption. The result of evaluation shows that the proposed router reduces the power consumption by 42.4% on average at 2GHz and the expense of only 0.5-2.0% performance overhead.