Proactive aging management in heterogeneous NoCs through a criticality-driven routing approach

The emergence of power efficient heterogeneous NoCs presents an intriguing challenge in NoC reliability, particularly due to aging degradation. To effectively tackle this challenge, this work presents a dynamic routing algorithm that exploits the architecture level criticality of network packets while routing. Our proposed framework uses a Wearout Monitoring System (to track NBTI effect) and architecture-level criticality information to create a routing policy that restricts aging degradation with minimal impact on system level performance. Compared to the state-of-the-art BRAR (Buffered-Router Aware Routing), our best scheme achieves 38%, 53% and 29% improvements on network latency, system performance and Energy Delay Product per Flit (EDPPF) overheads, respectively.