6.1 Introduction
As the number of processing elements keeps on increasing in network-on-chip (NoC), power consumption is one of the major concerns in designing such systems since it affects their battery life and packaging costs for heat dissipation. The increasing power density not only raises packaging and cooling challenges, but also enhances reliability problems as the mean time between failures (MTBF) decreases exponentially with temperature. In addition, timing requirement degrades and leakage current increases with temperature. Since last decade power consumption has not been a primary concern in chip design, while the cost, area, and timing issues were mostly being addressed by the designers. ...
