An Efficient Way to Increase Performance by Using Low Power Reconfigurable Routers

Abstract

In this paper, the advantage of the use of an NoC with reconfigurable Routers has been presented instead of homogeneous ones. . In this paper we propose the use of a reconfigurable router, where the buffer slots are dynamically allocated to increase router efficiency in an NoC, even under rather different communication loads. In the proposed architecture, the depth of each buffer word used in the input channels of the routers can be reconfigured at run time. Using reconfiguration, one can dynamically change the buffer depth to each channel, in accordance to the necessity of the application, increasing the power efficiency of the system for the same performance level. The reconfigurable router allows up to 52% power savings, while maintaining the same performance as that of a homogeneous router, but using a 64% smaller buffer size.