A low-power network-on-chip architecture for tile-based chip multi-processors

Technology scaling of tiled-based CMPs reduces the physical size of each tile and increases the number of tiles per die. This trend directly impacts the on-chip interconnect; even though the tile population increases, the inter-tile link distances scale down proportionally to the tile dimensions. The decreasing inter-tile wire lengths can be exploited to enable swift link traversal between neighboring tiles, after appropriate wire engineering. Building on this premise, we propose a technique to rapidly transfer flits between adjacent routers in half a clock cycle, by utilizing both edges of the clock during the sending and receiving operations. Half-cycle link traversal enables, for the first time, substantial reductions in (a) link power, irrespective of the data switching profile, and (b) buffer power (through buffer-size reduction), without incurring any latency/throughput loss. In fact, the proposed architecture also yields some latency improvements over a baseline NoC. Detailed hardware analysis using placed-and-routed designs, and cycle-accurate full-system simulations corroborate the significant power and latency improvements.