Energy-efficient Custom Topology Generation for Link-failure-aware Network-on-chip in Voltage-frequency Island Regime

Abstract

The voltage-frequency island (VFI) design paradigm has strong potential for achieving high energy efficiency in communication centric manycore system-on-chip (SoC) design called network-on-chip (NoC). However, because of the diminished scaling of wire-dimension and supply voltage as well as threshold voltage in modern CMOS technology, the vulnerability to link failure in VFI NoC is becoming a crucial challenge. In this paper, we propose an energy-optimized topology generation technique for VFI NoC to cope with permanent link failures. Based on the energy consumption model, we exploit the on-chip communication traffic patterns and characteristics of link failures in the early design stage to accommodate diverse applications and architectures. Experimental results using a number of multimedia application benchmarks show the effectiveness of the proposed three-step custom topology generation method in terms of energy consumption and latency without any degradation in the fault coverage metric.