Adaptive voltage control for energy-efficient NoC links

Abstract

As we enter the many-core integration era driven by advances in multiprocessor system-on-chip innovations, interconnect emerges as the bottleneck in achieving energy efficiency in systems-on-chip. This chapter surveys the state-of-the-art in energy-efficient communication link design for NoCs. After reviewing techniques at the datalink and physical abstraction layers, we introduce a lookahead-based transition-aware adaptive voltage control method for achieving improved energy-efficiency at moderate cost in performance and reliability. Limitations of this method are evaluated and future prospects in energy-efficient link design are projected. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.