Improving EDP in wireless NoC-enabled multicore chips via DVFS pruning

The millimeter-wave small-world wireless NoC (mSWNoC) is shown to be capable of improving the overall latency and energy dissipation characteristics compared to the conventional wireline mesh-based counterpart. The mSWNoC helps in improving the energy dissipation even further in presence of dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS). On-chip voltage regulators are required to tune the voltage depending on the workload. Though it is possible to have multiple voltage levels by designing suitable on-chip regulators, certain voltage levels are underutilized for specific applications. Hence, unnecessary voltage levels should be pruned, reducing the design complexity of the on-chip voltage regulators. In certain circumstances, the pruned DVFS method improves the energy-delay product (EDP) compared to the fine-grained DVFS while still remaining within an acceptable performance boundary.