Aggressive Fine-Grained Power Gating of NoC Buffers

Power gating is effective for networks-on-chip (NoCs) to reduce the excessive leakage power dissipated by idle network components. Most existing NoC power-gating approaches rely on the routing algorithms to mitigate the power-gating blocking latency problem. When the network becomes faulty and fault-tolerant routing algorithms are applied, these approaches are no longer applicable or can seriously degrade the performance. Other approaches propose fine-grained buffer power gating, but they are too conservative in power saving due to the buffer backpressure flow control. To address these problems, we propose an aggressive fine-grained power gating of flit-sized buffer entries by adopting backpressureless flow control in an input-buffered network. The power-gating decisions are made based on the flit deflection rate. However, directly applying the backpressureless flow control leads to the difficulties of multiflit packet truncation and protocol deadlocks. Therefore, we modify the packet injection architecture to avoid packet truncation. This is done by chaining the local input port with a randomly chosen input port. Finally, we design a progressive recovery framework to handle both livelocks and protocol deadlocks. It does not need to truncate packets or strictly separate different message classes when the network is free of livelocks or protocol deadlocks. The experimental results show that with a hardware overhead of 9.6%, our design can save up to 59% network power consumption in both a fault-free and a faulty NoC with little zero-load latency penalty. Our design also approaches an ideal energy-proportional NoC because it can constantly reduce power consumption over a wide range of injection rates.