Network-on-Chips (NoCs) with wireless inductive coupling have been utilized in real heterogeneous multicore systems. Although the inductive-coupling itself is energy-efficient (e.g., 0.14pJ per bit [1]), inductors continuously consume a certain amount of power, regardless of packet transfers. That is, inductors waste significant power especially when the utilization of vertical links (i.e., inductors) is low, which is a typical use case of 3-D ICs that the most communications are within a chip while the communications between chips are infrequent. Such power can be reduced by shutting down the link by controlling bias voltage of transistors used in the transmitter and receiver. Here, we propose generalized link on-off techniques for wireless NoCs with irregular network topologies. The simulation shows that the proposed low-power techniques reduce the power consumption by 43.8%–55.0%.
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