Design-Space Exploration and Optimization of an Energy-Efficient and Reliable 3-D Small-World Network-on-Chip

A 3-D network-on-chip (NoC) enables the design of high performance and low power many-core chips. Existing 3-D NoCs are inadequate for meeting the ever-increasing performance requirements of many-core processors since they are simple extensions of regular 2-D architectures and they do not fully exploit the advantages provided by 3-D integration. Moreover, the anticipated performance gain of a 3-D NoC-enabled many-core chip may be compromised due to the potential failures of through-silicon-vias that are predominantly used as vertical interconnects in a 3-D IC. To address these problems, we propose a machine-learning-inspired predictive design methodology for energy-efficient and reliable many-core architectures enabled by 3-D integration. We demonstrate that a small-world network-based 3-D NoC (3-D SWNoC) performs significantly better than its 3-D MESH-based counterparts. On average, the 3-D SWNoC shows 35% energy-delay-product improvement over 3-D MESH for the PARSEC and SPLASH2 benchmarks considered in this paper. To improve the reliability of 3-D NoC, we propose a computationally efficient spare-vertical link (sVL) allocation algorithm based on a state-space search formulation. Our results show that the proposed sVL allocation algorithm can significantly improve the reliability as well as the lifetime of 3-D SWNoC.