Double Stairs: A Fault-Tolerant Routing Algorithm for Networks-on-Chip

Abstract

Reliability is one of the main concerns in the design of networks-on-chip (NoCs) due to the use of deep submicron technologies in fabrication of such products. This paper presents a new fault-tolerant routing algorithm called double stairs for NoCs. Double stairs routing algorithm is a low overhead routing that has the ability to deal with fault. The proposed routing algorithm makes a redundant copy of each packet at the source node and routes the original and redundant packets in a new partially adaptive routing algorithm. The method is evaluated for various packet injection rates and fault rates. Experimental results show that the proposed routing algorithm offers the best trade-off between performance and fault tolerance compared to other routing algorithms, namely flooding, XYX and probabilistic flooding.