Design and Modeling of a Voltage-Frequency Controller for Network-on-Chip Routers base on Fuzzy-Logic

Abstract

Network-on-Chip (NoC) paradigm allows designers to integrate efficiently more intellectual properties (IPs) into a single chip system. However, the power consumption has become one of the most critical issues for designing such large complex systems. Low power design can be achieved by scaling the voltage and frequency of the target components. The question is how to make the voltage-frequency scaling adaptable to the required performance of the system at run-time while reducing as much as possible the power consumption. In this paper, we present the design and modeling of a Voltage-Frequency Controller for NoC routers based on fuzzy-logic processing. The communication traffic of a network router will be predicted by a fuzzy-logic algorithm. Then the voltage and frequency of the router will be dynamically scaled according to the predicted results in order to get power consumption optimal for the network router. The Voltage-Frequency Controller is then modeled at register-transfer level using VHDL -- a hardware description language. The most important part of the proposed controller, the fuzzy-logic processor (FLP) designed with the famous Sugeno model, has been successfully implemented on FPGA devices.