Low-power design methodology for an on-chip bus with adaptive bandwidth capability

This paper describes a low-power design methodology for a bus architecture based on hybrid current/voltage mode signaling for deep sub-micrometer on-chip interconnects that achieves high data transmission rates while minimizing the number of repeaters by nearly 1/3. The technique uses low-impedance current-mode sensing to increase the data throughput and minimizes the static power dissipation inherent to current-mode signaling by adaptively changing the interconnection bandwidth given a change in input signal activity. Since bandwidth is related to power dissipation, the adaptive bus attains energy efficient data transmission by expending minimum power required to support the bus signal activity. The design method is based on statistical analysis of address streams extracted for typical benchmark programs using a microprocessor time-based simulator in combination with circuitlevel power analysis. Simulation results indicate improvements in power dissipation of up to 65% and 40% over c...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: DAC
• Authors: Rizwan Bashirullah, Wentai Liu, Ralph K. Cavin III
• Keywords: Computer Architecture, DAC 2003, On-chip Interconnect, Power Dissipation, Static Power Dissipation