Energy-efficient wireless network-on-chip architecture with log-periodic on-chip antennas

Abstract

On-chip wireless interconnects have emerged as a promising alternative to conventional wireline interconnects in Network-on-Chip (NoC) fabrics for multicore systems. However, it is not practical in the immediate future to arbitrarily scale up the number of wireless links without innovations in the physical layer. Here, we explore the design of a directional on-chip antenna based on a log-periodic structure. In this paper we propose the design of a wireless NoC (WiNoC) architecture with concurrent wireless links using these directional on-chip antennas. Through cycle accurate simulations we demonstrate that this novel WiNoC architecture attains better performance and energy efficiency compared to the state-of-the-art token based WiNoC of similar topology.