Design of Low Power Multi - mode Router for Network - on - chip in Dark Silicon Era

In this paper, we propose a multi-mode router, which supports three modes: bypass, bufferless and normal. By using the power gating technology, it can dynamically switch modes under different network loads, and effectively reduce the power consumption. Besides, in the bufferless mode, we propose an input priority judgment method and an output port allocation method to reduce the packet deflection rate. The experimental results show that compared with the basic wormhole router, the router working in the bypass mode can save nearly one hundred times power consumption with only 0.76% additional area overhead and the router working in the bufferless mode can save nearly 48.8% power consumption with 7.04% additional area overhead, that is, the proposed multi-mode router can meet the purpose of low power design and can adapt to the background of dark silicon.