A fully-asynchronous low-power framework for GALS NoC integration

Requiring more bandwidth at reasonable power consumption, new communication infrastructures must provide adequate solutions to guarantee performance during physical integration. In this paper, we propose the design of a low-power asynchronous Network-on-Chip which is implemented in a bottom-up approach using optimized hard-macros. This architecture is fully testable and a new design flow is proposed to overcome CAD tools limitations regarding asynchronous logic. The proposed architecture has been successfully implemented in CMOS 65nm in a complete circuit. It achieves a 550Mflit/s throughput on silicon, and exhibits 86% power reduction compared to an equivalent synchronous NoC version.