An energy-efficient millimeter-wave wireless NoC with congestion-aware routing and DVFS

Traditional multicore designs, based on the Network-on-Chip (NoC) paradigm, suffer from high latency, significant power consumption and temperature hotspots as the system size scales up due to the inherent multi-hop nature of the communication fabric. NoCs have been shown to achieve increased performance by inserting long-range wired links following the principles of small-world graphs [1]. Design and optimization of multi- and many-core systems on chip (SoCs) that exploit small-world effects have already been demonstrated [1]. Small-world graphs are characterized by many short-distance links between neighboring nodes as well as a few relatively long-distance direct shortcuts. These networks can be further improved by replacing the long-distance shortcuts with single-hop, energy-efficient, wireless links. Wireless NoCs (WiNoCs) with millimeter (mm)-wave wireless links working at 10-100 GHz is envisioned as an enabling technology to design low-power and high-bandwidth massive multicore architectures [2]. These mm-wave small-world NoC (mSWNoC) networks are used as the interconnection backbone in this work.