Generic Monitoring and Management Infrastructure for 3D NoC-Bus Hybrid Architectures

Abstract

Three-dimensional integrated circuits (3D ICs) achieve enhanced system integration and improved performance at lower cost and reduced area footprint. In order to exploit the intrinsic capability of reducing the wire length in 3D ICs, 3D NoC-Bus Hybrid mesh architecture was proposed which provides performance, power consumption, and area benefits. Besides its various advantages, this architecture has a unique and hitherto previously unexplored way to implement an efficient system-wide monitoring network. In this paper, an integrated low-cost monitoring platform for 3D stacked mesh architectures is proposed which can be efficiently used for various system management purposes such as traffic monitoring, thermal management and fault tolerance. The proposed generic monitoring and management infrastructure called ARB-NET utilizes bus arbiters to exchange the monitoring information directly with each other without using the data network. As a test case, based on the proposed monitoring and management platform, a fully congestion-aware and inter-layer fault tolerant routing algorithm named AdaptiveXYZ is presented taking advantage of viable information generated using bus arbiter network. In addition, we propose a thermal monitoring and management strategy on top of our ARB-NET infrastructure. Compared to recently proposed stacked mesh 3D NoCs, our extensive simulations with synthetic and real benchmarks reveal that our architecture using the AdaptiveXYZ routing can help in achieving significant power and performance improvements while preserving the system reliability with negligible hardware overhead.