Fault Tolerant Routing Methodology for Mesh-of-Tree based Network-on-Chips using Local Reconfiguration

Abstract

Increase in the processing elements in a System-on- Chip (SoC) has led to an increasing complexity between the cores in the entire network. This communication bottleneck led to rise in the new paradigm called Network-on-Chip (NoC). These NoC are very much susceptible to various types of faults which can be transient, intermittent or permanent. This paper presents a fault-tolerant routing technique which can route the packets from a source to a destination in presence of permanent faults in the leaf routers of Mesh-of-Tree topology where cores are connected. This is achieved by using reconfiguration in the local ports of the leaf routers by inserting multiplexers as a layer between the leaf routers and cores in the topology. The results consider the impact of the reconfiguration on the performance of NoC in presence of faults. Experimental results have shown improvements in terms of information reaching their respective destination in presence of router faults.