Bufferless NoCs with Scheduled Deflection Routing
Chen Chen, Zirui Tao, Joshua San Miguel · 2020
Bufferless networks-on-chip (NoCs) with deflection routing are a promising approach for saving area and power in the communication fabric of many-core processors. However, deflection routing imposes fundamental limitations on the number of input and outports per router, which compromises the NoCs' ability to adapt to permanent link failures due to wearout. The susceptibility to wearout of modern NoCs has increased due to deeper sub-micro CMOS process technology. In this paper, we propose scheduled deflections for bufferless NoCs (SchedNoC), a framework that prolongs the lifetime of bufferless NoCs via strategic time-multiplexing of links, which allows links to fail arbitrarily while ensuring correct network operation. We show that SchedNoC can increase the NoCs' lifetime by 62.5%- 71.8% at only 4%-15% performance degradation compared to conventional deflection routing.