A small-granularity solution on fault-tolerant in 2D-Mesh Network-on-Chip

A small-granularity solution with high performance and low area cost for fault-tolerant routing of hard error in 2D-Mesh Network-on-Chip is proposed. This solution presents a new fault model, defines separately node-fault and link-fault, reduces situations classified as node-fault effectively, and consequently improves the performance of the network. By defining some new paths to substitute failure paths, data packets can be routed along the new paths which are formed by the neighbor nodes of node-fault or link-fault. Finally, a fault-tolerant wormhole router based on XY routing algorithm is designed according to the solution. The evaluation results show that network performance can be improved by 15% when link-fault occurs in the network. Compared to the solution proposed by one reference, the average latency is reduced to 50% and the throughput is almost doubled, while the silicon area penalty of this router is almost the same.