Thermal hotspot reduction in mm-Wave wireless NoC architectures

In the design of high-performance massive multicore chips, power and temperature have become dominant constraints. Traditional multicore designs, based on the Network-on-Chip (NoC) paradigm, suffer from high latency and power dissipation as the system size scales up due to the inherent multi-hop nature of communication. Introducing long-range, low-power, and high-bandwidth wireless shortcuts between far apart cores can significantly enhance the performance of NoC fabrics. The millimeter-wave small-world NoC (mSWNoC) is shown to be capable of improving the overall latency and energy dissipation characteristics compared to the conventional mesh-based counterpart. While there is a significant temperature reduction in the network due to the mSWNoC architecture, a load-imbalanced network is still susceptible to local thermal hotspots. In this paper, we address the problem of network-induced temperature hotspots in mSWNoC by incorporating adaptive routing strategies, which can reduce temperatures even further without compromising the achievable performance benefits.