An Analysis of Connectivity and Yield for 2D Mesh Based NoC with Interconnect Router Failures

The manufacturing process of modern day processors is both costly and complex and there are many different factors that influence the quality of a chip when it comes off the production line. Typically, hundreds of chips are manufactured from a single silicon wafer and as we go deeper into the sub-micron era of microchip manufacturing, the potential for defects during production increases. The advent of multi-core computing may introduce problems related to connectivity and yield for high volume manufacturing (HVM). In this paper we explore potential benefits that fault tolerant routing provides within the NoC (network-on-chip) paradigm with a study of the relationship between connectivity and yield at the interconnect routing level. For dimension-order routing based mesh NoCs, we describe two methods that are logically straightforward to implement and that can be used to increase the yield of chips with interconnect router faults.