A thermal-aware application specific routing algorithm for Network-on-Chip design

Abstract

In this work, we propose an application specific routing algorithm to reduce the hot-spot temperature for Network-on-chip (NoC). Using the traffic information of applications, we develop a routing scheme which can achieve a higher adaptivity than the generic ones and at the same time distribute the traffic more uniformly. A set of deadlock-free admissible paths for all the communications is first obtained. To reduce the hot-spot temperature, we find the optimal distribution ratio of the communication traffic among the set of candidate paths. The problem of finding this optimal distribution ratio is formulated as a linear programming (LP) problem and is solved offline. A router microarchitecture which supports our ratio-based selection policy is also proposed. From the simulation results, the peak energy reduction considering the energy consumption of both the processors and routers can be as high as 16.6% for synthetic traffic and real benchmarks.