A Fault-Tolerant Routing Method without Creating Faulty Regions for Three-Dimensional Mesh NoCs

This paper proposes a novel fault-tolerant routing method for 3D mesh Network-on-Chips (NoCs). Existing methods developed for the 3D mesh topology basically create faulty regions to deliver packets from any source to destination nodes. However, this results in low communication performance and low node utilization. To solve the problem, the proposed method does not necessitate to crate faulty regions; it utilizes the function of passage and predefined detour paths to avoid faulty nodes. Simulation results show that, compared with the two existing methods, the proposed method enables to reduce communication latency by about 65%, and increase the node utilization rate by about 51%.