Adaptive Multi-Voltage Scaling with Utilization Prediction for Energy-Efficient Wireless NoC

Networks-on-Chip (NoCs) are fast becoming the de-facto communication infrastructures in chip multi-processors for large-scale applications. Wireless NoCs (WNoCs) offer a promising solution to reduce the long-distance communication bottlenecks of conventional NoCs by augmenting them with single hop, long-range wireless links. However, power consumption in routers and network elements still remains considerably high at ultra-deep submicron technologies. Analysis of network resources for several benchmarks shows that, utilization is application dependent and the desired performance can be achieved even without operating all resources at maximum specifications. In this work, we propose an energy-efficient WNoC architecture using Adaptive Multi-Voltage Scaling (AMS) to dynamically vary supply voltage for NoC routers and Wireless Interfaces (WIs) without adversely impacting performance. The proposed scheme uses a probabilistic model to predict router utilization during different application phases and scales voltage accordingly. It further reduces network energy by power-gating WIs that are not engaged in active communication to minimize their power consumption. We present detailed utilization estimation procedure, AMS control mechanism, and its hardware implementation. It saves up to 56 percent in network packet energy consumption and 62.50 percent power consumption in WIs for 256 core system as compared to baseline architectures without incurring significant performance penalty and area overheads.