Power-gating technique for network-on-chip buffers

A new approach to reducing leakage power in network-on-chip buffers is presented. The non-uniformity of buffer utilisation is leveraged across the network and power-gating is applied to scarcely utilised buffers. Instead of turning-off the buffers completely, a buffer portion is kept turned-on. This design choice has a significant performance benefit because the buffer is always able to receive network packets. Design aspects and trade-offs in a 45 nm CMOS technology are discussed and results obtained over video application benchmarks are presented. It is shown that it is possible to reduce buffer leakage by 40% without performance penalty.