Power and Area Efficient Design of Network-on-Chip Router through Utilization of Idle Buffers

Network-on-Chip (NoC) is the interconnection platform that answers the requirements of the modern on-Chip design. Small optimizations in NoC router architecture can show a significant improvement in the overall performance of NoC based systems. Power consumption, area overhead and the entire NoC performance is influenced by the router buffers. Resource sharing for on-chip network is critical to reduce the chip area and power consumption. Virtual channel buffer sharing by other router ports has been proposed to enhance the performance of on-chip communication. We approach the router architecture optimization by utilizing the idle buffers instead of increasing the number and size of buffers for desired throughput.