Graceful deadlock-free fault-tolerant routing algorithm for 3D Network-on-Chip architectures

Three-Dimensional Networks-on-Chip (3D-NoC) has been presented as an auspicious solution merging the high parallelism of Network-on-Chip (NoC) interconnect paradigm with the high-performance and lower interconnect-power of 3-dimensional integration circuits. However, 3D-NoC systems are exposed to a variety of manufacturing and design factors making them vulnerable to different faults that cause corrupted message transfer or even catastrophic system failures. Therefore, a 3D-NoC system should be fault-tolerant to transient malfunctions or permanent physical damages. In this paper, we present an efficient fault-tolerant routing algorithm, called Hybrid-LookAhead-Fault-Tolerant (HLAFT), which takes advantage of both local and look-ahead routing to boost the performance of 3D-NoC systems while ensuring fault-tolerance. A deadlockrecovery technique associated with HLAFT, named Random-Access-Buffer (RAB), is also presented. RAB takes advantage of look-ahead routing to detect and remove deadlock with no considerably additional hardware complexity. We implemented the proposed algorithm