A Fault-Tolerant Deflection Routing for Network-on-Chip

Abstract

Network-on-Chip (NoC) has become a promising design methodology for the modern on-chip communication infrastructure of many-core system. To guarantee the reliability of traffic, effective fault-tolerant scheme is critical to NoC systems. In this paper, we propose a fault-tolerant deflection routing (FTDR) to address faults on links and router by redundancy technique. The proposed FTDR employs backup links and a redundant fault-tolerant unit (FTU) at router-level to sustain the traffic reliability of NoC. Experimental results show that the proposed FTDR yields an improvement of routing performance and fault-tolerant capability over the reported fault-tolerant routing schemes in average flit deflection rate, average packet latency, saturation throughput and reliability by up to 13.5%, 9.8%, 10.6% and 17.5%, respectively. The layout area and power consumption are increased merely 3.5% and 2.6%.