An Effective Routing Algorithm to Avoid Unnecessary Link Abandon in 2D Mesh NoCs

In NoCs where each interconnection between neighboring routers is composed of a pair of unidirectional links, a broken link usually leads to the abandon of the entire interconnection, even if the other one is still functional. In this paper, we propose a fault tolerant Routing Algorithm (RA) which can efficiently utilize these fault free links when their pair broken links have available misrouting-contour sides. Constraints on the usage of Virtual Channels are adaptively applied according to the fault distribution, to avoid deadlock and unnecessary resource reservation. When compared with solid fault region tolerant RAs, which always abandon the entire interconnection, the proposed algorithm has twice higher saturation point under synthetic uniform traffics, and can on average diminish the execution time overhead for the evaluated applications, sample and sat ell, by 62.6% and 76.6%, respectively. Our experiments indicate that the embedding of the proposed algorithm into a baseline router increases the area cost and power consumption by 7.43% and 4.43%, respectively, which is not that significant given that the platform area is usually dominated by the computing cores area.