Data reuse driven memory and network-on-chip co-synthesis

Abstract

NoCs present a possible communication infrastructure solution to deal with increased design complexity and shrinking time-to-market. The communication infrastructure is a significant source of energy consumption and many attempts at energy efficient NoC synthesis have been proposed. However, in addition to the communication subsystem, the memory subsystem is an important contributor to chip energy consumption. These two subsystems are not independent, and a design with the lowest memory power consumption may not have the lowest overall power consumption. In this paper we propose to exploit a data reuse analysis approach for co-synthesis of memory and NoC communication architectures. We present a co-synthesis heuristic targeting NoCs, such as Æthereal, with mesh topology. We show that our data reuse analysis based synthesis reduces communication energy alone by 31% on average as well as memory and communication energy by 44% on average in comparison with the similar approaches that do not employ data reuse analysis. We also show that our memory/NoC co-synthesis heuristic further reduces communication energy by up to 38% in comparison with a computationally less expensive traditional two-step synthesis approach, where the memory subsystem is synthesized before the synthesis of NoC. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to investigate the influence of memory subsystem synthesis on NoC power consumption and to present a memory and NoC co-synthesis heuristic. © International Federation for Information Processing 2007.