LAURA-NoC: Local Automatic Rate Adjustment in Network-on-Chips With a Simple DVFS

Abstract

In this brief, we propose local automatic rate adjustment in network-on-chips (NoC) (LAURA-NoC), a NoC with a distributed approach to dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS). The utilization of the switch buffers is used in a local feedback loop to automatically determine the appropriate clock frequency and voltage that allow the switch to sustain the rate at its input ports, without a global controller. The DVFS controller is simple and uses 2 voltage and 16 frequency values. We report a significant power saving compared to a global DVFS approach in a 45-nm CMOS technology, 33 % on average over four realistic video applications.