An Adaptive Approach to Manage the Number of Virtual Channels

Network-on-chip (NoC) is a precious approach to handle huge number of transistors by virtue of technology scaling to lower than 50 nm. Virtual channels have been introduced in order to improve the performance according to a timing multiplexing concept in each physical channel. The incremental effect of virtual channels on power consumption has been shown in literatures. The issue of power saving has always been controversial to many designers. In this paper, we introduce a new technique which tries to adaptively mange the number of virtual channels in order to reduce the power consumption while not degrading the performance of the network without any reconfiguration. Our experimental results show the efficiency of our method in a torus topology under different traffic models and Duato routing algorithm with 49 % and 30 % power saving in the best and worst conditions, respectively.