Analyzing power-thermal-performance trade-offs in a high-performance 3D NoC architecture

The emergence of three-dimensional (3D) network-on-chip (NoC) has revolutionized the design of high-performance and energy efficient manycore chips. However, in general, 3D NoC architectures still suffer from high power density and the resultant thermal hotspots leading to functionality and reliability concerns over time. The power consumption and thermal profiles of 3D NoCs can be improved by incorporating a Voltage Frequency Island (VFI)-based power management strategy and Reciprocal Design Symmetry (RDS)-based floor planning. In this paper, we undertake a detailed design space exploration for 3D NoC by considering power-thermal-performance (PTP) trade-offs. We specifically consider a small-world network-enabled 3D NoC (3D SWNoC) in this performance evaluation due to its superior performance and energy-efficiency compared to any other existing 3D NoC architectures. We demonstrate that the VFI-enabled 3D SWNoC lowers the energy-delay-product (EDP) by 57.3% on an average compared to a 2D MESH without VFI. Moreover, by incorporating VFI, we reduce the maximum temperature of 3D SWNoC by 15.2% on an average compared to the non-VFI counterpart. By complementing the VFI-based power management with RDS-based floor planning, the 3D SWNoC reduces the maximum temperature by 25.1% on an average compared to the non-VFI counterpart.