A survey of techniques for energy efficient on-chip communication

Abstract

Interconnects have been shown to be a dominant source of energy consumption in modern day System-on-Chip (SoC) designs. With a large (and growing) number of electronic systems being designed with battery considerations in mind, minimizing the energy consumed in on-chip interconnects becomes crucial. Further, the use of nanometer technologies is making it increasingly important to consider reliability issues during the design of SoC communication architectures. Continued supply voltage scaling has led to decreased noise margins, making interconnects more susceptible to noise sources such as crosstalk, power supply noise, radiation induced defects, etc. The resulting transient faults cause the interconnect to behave as an unreliable transport medium for data signals. Therefore, fault tolerant communication mechanism, such as Automatic Repeat Request (ARQ), Forward Error Correction (FEC), etc., which have been widely used in the networking community, are likely to percolate to the SoC domain. This paper presents a survey of techniques for energy efficient on-chip communication. Techniques operating at different levels of the communication design hierarchy are described, including circuit-level techniques, such as low voltage signaling, architecture-level techniques, such as communication architecture selection and bus isolation, system-level techniques, such as communication based power management and dynamic voltage scaling for interconnects, and network-level techniques, such as error resilient encoding for packetized on-chip communication. Emerging technologies, such as Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) based buses, and wireless interconnects are also surveyed.