Reducing Power Consumption in NoC Design with no Effect on Performance and Reliability

High reliability, low power consumption and high performance are key objectives in the design of NoCs. These three design objectives should be considered simultaneously in order to have an optimal design. This paper proposes a method to reduce power consumption of an application specific NoC. This is done in two steps: 1) Extra virtual channels are used in the router architecture to increase the performance in an application specific NoC, and 2) The amount of the performance gain is then set to the initial point using frequency scaling technique, hence reducing the power consumption, without corruption of reliability. The simulation results show that the method can reduce the power consumption up to 20% depending on the specific application.