Intra and Inter Routing based Lifetime Improvement Method for VFI Network-on-Chip
Ju Sung Kim, Jeong Beom Hong, Tae Hee Han · International Journal of Information and Electronics Engineering · 2019
With the advent of the IoT age, low-power technology inside chips is a prerequisite.As lower power requirements have become important, network-on-chip (NoC) architecture has also begun to adopt design techniques that use a voltage frequency island (VFI), which is a low-power chip design paradigm.While research on maximizing the energy efficiency of NoC in the VFI environment has been performed, studies on the lifetime enhancement of the chip are scarce.In the previous research, the VFI routing scheme allocates a path that minimizes the VFI region change among the shortest paths because it considers only energy.However, if only the routing based on the minimum route is performed, a hotspot occurs owing to the traffic concentration, and the lifetime of the specific link is deteriorated rapidly.We herein propose a routing method that decreases the link failure probability and increases the lifetime in VFI NoC.Our algorithm uses different routing schemes for inter-and intra-communications to distribute traffic as much as possible.The proposed method is a routing method that can optimize energy consumption while focusing on traffic distribution using different routing methods according to each situation.This has resulted in an overall energy efficient load balancing and increased lifetime.The experimental results of mesh topology indicate that the proposed routing method increases the mean time to failure by 31.78% and the energy overhead is 4.45%.