Impact of proactive temperature management on performance of Networks-on-Chip

With the progress of deep submicron technology power consumption and temperature related issues have become dominant factors for chip design. Therefore, very large-scale integrated systems like Systems-on-Chip (SoCs) are exposed to an increasing thermal stress. On the one hand, this necessitates effective mechanisms for thermal management. On the other hand, appliance of thermal management is accompanied by disturbance of system integrity and degradation of system performance. In this paper we propose to precompute and proactively manage on-chip temperature of systems based on Networks-on-Chip (NoCs). Thereby, traditional reactive approaches, utilizing the NoC infrastructure to perform thermal management, can be replaced. This results not only in shorter response times for appliance of management measures and therefore in a reduction of temperature and thermal imbalances, but also in less impairment of system integrity and performance. Simulations show that proactive management achieves improvements of nearly 150% regarding reduction of average temperature inside a 3×3 NoC compared to identical reactive approaches, while mitigating additional delay for packet transmission by more than 50%.