Flexible Self-Healing Router for Reliable and High-Performance Network-on-Chips Architecture

NoCs are a well established research topic and several implementations have been proposed for fault tolerance or self-healing. Self-healing multi-core architectures are getting wide attention, which integrates redundant cores to improve the manufacturing yield or aging faults. Self-healing is the ability of a system to detect faults or failures and fix them through healing or repairing. In current research, there are some challenges such as area overhead, power consumption, scalability, and reliability. NoC's performance will decrease with faulty routers which isolate process element (PE) from other routers. This paper presents an approach of self healing router to make PE connected to the network and using it as a path for routing. The proposed approach is based on adding self-healing block in each router to heal the network and make it works within expected performance. To evaluate the method, the reliability of the proposed technique is studied and compared to conventional system with different failure rates. The proposed method is implemented using VHDL and the simulation results are obtained using ISE Xilinx Vertex 5. The area overhead is 18% for the proposed approach which is much lower compared to other approaches using redundancy. Also, the latency and throughput of the proposed approach is investigated after accounting for faulty routers.