Fault-tolerant topology generation method for application-specific network-on-chips
Author
Tosun, S.
Ajabshir, V. B.
Mercanoglu, O.
Ozturk, O.
Date
2015Source Title
IEEE Transactions on Computer - Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems
Print ISSN
0278-0070
Electronic ISSN
1937-4151
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Volume
34
Issue
9
Pages
1495 - 1508
Language
English
Type
ArticleItem Usage Stats
136
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119
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Abstract
As the technology sizes of integrated circuits (ICs) scale down rapidly, current transistor densities on chips dramatically increase. While nanometer feature sizes allow denser chip designs in each technology generation, fabricated ICs become more susceptible to wear-outs, causing operation failure. Even a single link failure within an on-chip fabric can halt communication between application blocks, which makes the entire chip useless. In this paper, we aim to make faulty chips designed with network-on-chip (NoC) communication usable. Specifically, we present fault-tolerant irregular topology-generation method for application-specific NoC designs. Designed NoC topology allows different routing path if there is a link failure on the default routing path. Additionally, we present a simulated annealing-based application mapping algorithm aiming to minimize total energy consumption of the NoC design. We compare fault-tolerant topologies with nonfault-tolerant application-specific irregular topologies on energy consumption, performance, and area using multimedia benchmarks and custom-generated graphs. Our results demonstrate that our method is able to determine fault-tolerant topologies with negligible area increase and better energy values.
Keywords
Energy minimizationBenchmarking
Conformal mapping
Design
Distributed computer systems
Energy utilization
Fault tolerance
Fault tolerant computer systems
Mapping
Microprocessor chips
Routers
Servers
Simulated annealing
Topology
VLSI circuits
Application specific
Application specific network on chip
Energy minimization
Integrated circuits (ICs)
Multimedia benchmarks
Network-on-chip (NoC)
Topology design
Total energy consumption