PAT-Noxim: A Precise Power & Thermal Cycle-Accurate NoC Simulator

Abstract

Ever increasing number of on-chip cores magnifies the need for efficient Network on Chip (NoC) architecture designs. To have a wide design space exploration, accurate simulators play a key role to estimate power consumption, area and temperature profile of NoCs. Access-Noxim as one of the well-known NoC simulators is used by several researchers to perform cycle-accurate simulations for different NoC architectures. However, this simulator lacks power and thermal accuracy due to ignoring the temperature/power cross impact which is also known as Temperature Effect Inversion. This paper presents PAT- Noxim, to address this source of inaccuracy in the Access- N oxim simulator. PAT-Noxim uses architecture-level tools to calculate power consumption and area more accurately with considering the power/temperature cross impact. PAT-Noxim simulator now supports several architectural alternatives including pipelined and non-pipelined routers, and arbitrary number of virtual channels per each port. In addition, the PAT-Noxim renders results for a wide ranges of VLSI fabrication technologies from 90 nm down to 22 nm. Obtained results by the PAT-Noxim simulator indicate 5.45% and 11.6% more accuracy in estimation of power consumption and temperature parameters respectively.