Dynamic NoC platform for varied application needs

Many-core processing platforms are gaining significant interest for a wide range of applications, viz., Internet of Things (IoT), consumer electronics, single-chip cloud computers, supercomputers, defense applications etc. Networks-on-Chip (NoCs) are accepted as the communication backbone for these many-core platforms. However, energy consumption in NoC components still remains considerably high. Specifically for large systems with many nodes in the network, a significant amount of energy is consumed by the communication infrastructure. The usage of the routers and resources associated with it are application dependent and for most applications performance requirements can be met without operating the whole communication infrastructure to its maximum limit. Dynamic reconfigurable system that can switch between both high performance and low power modes will be able to exploit the variable workload conditions provided by different applications. Among all the NoC components, Virtual Channels (VCs) are the most power hungry modules. This paper proposes a dynamic NoC platform (DNoC) that optimizes VC utilization for different applications using a smart router architecture. Power Management Controller (PMC) along with Utilization Computation Unit (UCU) controls and predicts the number of active VCs to achieve the required performance with minimum overhead. In our experiments the proposed solution provides 83.3% power benefit (best case scenario) with negligible throughput penalty compared to a baseline mesh router.