A fault-aware, reconfigurable and adaptive routing algorithm for NoC applications

This paper presents a very low cost routing method to tolerate faulty links and routers in mesh-based Networks-on-Chip (NoC). With reconfigurability, this new algorithm supports irregular topologies caused by faulty components in a network. It concurrently uses both fault and congestion information to route the packets by utilizing only two virtual channels for both fault-tolerance and adaptivity. This method has a multi-level fault-tolerance capability and therefore it is capable to tolerate more faulty components with additional costs. Its performance and overhead are evaluated through appropriate simulations and syntheses. The experimental results show that a significant reliability improvement is achieved against multiple component failures with only a few percent area and power overheads.