Design of adaptive communication channel buffers for low-power area-efficient network-on-chip architecture

Network-on-Chip (NoC)architectures provide a scalable solution to the wire delay constraints in deep submicron VLSI designs. Recent research into the ptimization of NoC architectures has shown that the design of buffers in the NoC routers influences the power consumption, area overhead and performance of the entire network. In this paper, we propose a low-power area-efficient NoC architecture by reducing the number of router buffers. As a reduction in the number of buffers degrades the network's performance, we propose to use the existing repeaters along the inter-router links as adaptive channel buffers for storing data when required. We evaluate the proposed adaptive communication channel buffers under static and dynamic buffer allocation in 8 x 8 mesh and folded torus network topologies. Simulation results show that reducing the router buffer size in half and using the adaptive channel buffers reduces the buffer power by 40-52% and leads to a 17-20% savings in overall network power with a 50% reduction in router area. The design with dynamic buffer allocation shows a marginal 1-5% drop in performance, while static buffer allocation shows a 10-20% drop in performance, for various traffic patterns.