Power management architecture in McNoC

Abstract

In this chapter we present the power management architecture of the McNoC platform. The power management architecture of McNoC offers distributed Dynamic Voltage Frequency Scaling (DVFS) and power down services to the platform at a fine level of granularity, allowing independent setting of frequency and supply voltage to all switch and resource nodes in the platform. The design style enables hierarchical physical design and solves the clock-domain-crossing problem with a solution based on rationally-related frequencies, which avoids the overhead associated with handshake. The architecture allows arbitrary power management regions to be defined and region-wide power management commands affecting all nodes in a region can be issued by the software layer that we call as Power Management Intelligence (PMINT).