NoC Power Estimation at the RTL Abstraction Level

Abstract

The increasing use of mobile electronic devices forces the design of integrated circuits to consider low power techniques. Current power estimation models for NoCs capitalize mostly in the volume of information transmitted through the network. This work presents a more precise NoC power estimation model, based in buffer reception rates, according to the traffic scenario applied to the network. Results show the accuracy of the model compared to industrial power estimation tools, with reduced execution time. The proposed method allows exploring the NoC design space, being employed to evaluate the benefit on using the multicast service.