Monitoring and Control of Temperature in Networks-on-Chip

Increasing integration densities and the emergence of nanotechnology cause issues related to reliability and power consumption to become dominant factors for the design of modern multi-core systems. Since the arising problems are enforced by high circuit temperatures, monitoring and control of on-chip temperature profiles need to be considered during design phase as well as during system operation. Hence, in this paper different approaches for the realization and integration of a monitoring system for temperature in multi-core systems based on Networks-on-Chip (NoCs) in combination with Dynamic Frequency Scaling (DFS) are investigated. Results show that both combinations using event-driven and time-driven forwarding more than double overall execution time and considerably reduce throughput of application data. Regarding performance of notification and reaction to temperature development event-driven forwarding clearly outperforms time-driven forwarding.