Power dissipation of the network-on-chip in a system-on-chip for MPEG-4 video encoding

In this paper we present a multi-processor system-on-chip (MPSoC) platform with six computational and four memory nodes interconnected with Arteris network-on-chip (NoC). The platform is dedicated for real-time video encoding applications for high resolution images (HDTV) and frame rates of up to 30 fps. Extensive experiments established the power dissipation models of all individual NoC components, i.e. network interfaces, routers and wires. Based on these power models and the NoC topology we built the power model of the complete NoC. Finally we derive the power dissipation of the NoC for MPEG4 simple profile encoder. The results show that depending on the image resolution the power dissipation of the communication infrastructure vary between 15 and 22 mW, which is comparable with the state of the art dedicated low-power implementations.