Process variation-aware routing in NoC based multicores

We propose a variation-aware source routing algorithm for a heterogeneous NoC where each router has a different operating latency, as a result of process variations. Our proposed scheme computes the best path for each communication, based on the inherent speed of the routers (dictated by process variations) and the current traffic pattern. Our results indicate that employing our proposed routing scheme reduces average packet latencies (our performance metric), in our applications, by up to 28% as compared to the deterministic and adaptive routing algorithms.