Maintaining real-time application timing similarity for defect-tolerant NoC-based many-core systems

Abstract

Many-core Network-on-Chip (NoC) processors are emerging in broad application areas, including those with timing requirements, such as real-time and multimedia applications. Typically, these processors employ core-level backup to improve yield. However, when defective cores are replaced by backup ones, the NoC topology changes. Consequently, a fine-tuned application based on timing parameters given by one topology may not meet the expected timing behavior under the new one. We first develop a metric to measure timing similarity of an application on different NoC topologies and then propose mixed binary quadratic programming and greedy algorithms to reconfigure a defect-tolerant many-core NoC.