Fault-Tolerant Application Specific Network-on-Chip Design

Network-on-Chip (NoC) has been introduced to address the communication problems associated with the traditional bus based System-on-Chip (SoC) architectures. NoC can be designed either using regular or irregular architectures. Even though many regular architectures have been proposed in the literature, there is a mismatch between the application requirements and the design. Application specific NoC designs have been proposed to match the requirements of the applications, which are irregular in nature. Due to the heavy integration of the components on the chip, designs that are vulnerable to faults in links can render the chip unusable. This paper first sets the benchmark of minimum possible communication cost and thereafter proposes a greedy algorithm to develop link fault-tolerant application specific topology for the given application core graph which meets that benchmark.