• The area and power consumption of the circuit switched router is 3.5 times less compared to the packet-switched router. The main reasons for this difference are the necessary buffers and extra control in the crossbar of the packet-switched router.
• Table 4 shows that the maximum bandwidth of both routers can meet the required bandwidth of the wireless applications as has been described in section 3.
• In contradiction to our expectations the number of bit flips has only a minor influence on the dynamic power consumption. We can also expect that a large set of data streams will have similar toggle behavior as the used random data set. A more relevant parameter is the number of data streams that have to be routed concurrently from the input lanes to the output lanes.
• The dynamic power consumption of scenario II up to IV does not increase considerably compared with Scenario I (no transport of data). This is caused by the relative high offset in the dynamic power consumption. For the circuit-switched router we expect to reduce this power consumption with clock gating. For clock gating we can use the configuration information of the router and switch off the unused lanes. If clock gating is used, we expect that this offset will decrease. The lower offset will cause more variations in the power consumption due to variations in the traffic patterns.
• The last observation is the non-straight line in Scenario III for the packet-switched router in Fig. 10. This is caused by the collision of stream 1 and 3 at the output port East. Apparently, the time-multiplexing of the link will cause extra switching behavior in the control of the crossbar and therefore increase the power consumption.
8. Conclusion and Future Work
In this paper we proposed a new reconfigurable circuit-switched router for a Network-on-Chip. The circuit-switched Network-on-Chip was expected to benefit from the common characteristics of three wireless applications. We showed that the circuit-switched NoC satisfies the requirements for the three different wireless applications.