PowerAntz: distributed power sharing strategy for network on chip

Abstract

Advent of Network-on-Chip (NoC) based complex system designs made on-chip power management a challenging issue. Power management schemes have been proposed to tackle the problem. But they fail to provide optimal sharing when the power budget distribution varies significantly among on-chip components that are placed further apart on a chip. This paper presents PowerAntz, a distributed power management strategy for NoC based systems. This adaptive and distributed approach to power sharing across various components of a large chip is shown to be a scalable solution. Our experiments have demonstrated PowerAntz to be up to 30% more effective in distributing power budget compared to existing strategies. Further, it also achieves up to 21.25% improvement in power utilization while keeping overhead as low as zero in best case.