Communication-aware VFI partitioning for GALS-based networks-on-chip

The voltage/frequency island (VFI) design paradigm is a practical architecture for energy-efficient networks-on-chip (NoC) systems. In VFI-based NoC systems, each island can be operated with different voltage and clock frequency and thus it is important to carefully partition processing elements (PEs) into islands based on their workloads and communications. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient design scheme that optimizes energy consumption and hardware costs in VFI-based NoC systems. Since on-chip networks take up a substantial portion of system power budget in NoC-based systems, the proposed scheme uses communication-aware VFI partitioning and tile mapping/routing algorithms to minimize the inter-VFI communications. Experimental results show that the proposed design technique can reduce communication energy consumption by 32–51% over existing techniques and total energy consumption by 3–14%.