Power reduction through physical placement of asynchronous routers

This paper presents a way to reduce power consumption by minimizing wirelength and hop-count of an asynchronous NoC using simulated annealing and force-directed algorithms. Asynchronous NoCs (aNoCs) can provide important benefits over clocked NoCs. However, there is little published research on generating a custom, optimized aNoC for a fixed- function, power-constrained system-on-chip (SoC). Such tools must consider physical SoC properties and especially NoC link delay and power. This research is motivated by this need, and the mantra that "transistors are fast, wires are slow and power-hungry," due to process scaling differences between transistors and global wires.