Biomimicry to network on chip: Router heart rate

The growing complexity of systems-on-chip creates the need to replace the bus-based architecture. Network-on-chip has been proposed to address the communication bottleneck of system-on-chip. Router is the key component of network-on-chip architecture. Router frequency is one of the critical parameters, which has direct impact on network-on-chip performance. This paper proposes an adaptive scheme for controlling the router frequency based on biomimicry. A complete evaluation for the proposed scheme over various network-on-chip sizes and different evaluation parameters are performed. Results show improvement in throughput and latency. Moreover, it saves up to 75% of buffer storage, up to 60% of dynamic power and achieving load balance for all routers in the network.