An asynchronous low-power innovative network-On-chip including design-for-test capabilities

The demands of scalable, low latency and power efficient System-On-Chip interconnect cannot be satisfied only by point-to-point or shared-bus interconnects. By providing more bandwidth at reasonable power consumption, new communication infrastructures like NoCs seem promising, but are still limited by implementation issues. We present in this paper an Asynchronous Network-on- Chip architecture with two main innovations. Firstly, an automatic power regulation scheme is proposed to dynamically save leakage and dynamic power consumption. Secondly, due to the current lack of testing methodology for asynchronous logic, we propose a novel DfT solution to allow acceptance of the asynchronous NoC. The proposed architecture has been fully implemented in a STMicroelectronics CMOS 65 nm technology, integrated in a complex test-chip and fabricated.