A Passage-Based Fault-Tolerant Routing Method for 3D Mesh NoCs Without Creating Faulty Regions

This paper proposes a novel fault-tolerant routing method without creating faulty regions for 3D mesh Network-on-Chips (NoCs). Most conventional methods create faulty regions containing faulty nodes and route packets around them to reach the destinations. However, the creation of faulty regions results in low communication performance and low node utilization. To overcome the two problems, the proposed method does not create faulty regions based on the idea of predefining paths in the absence of shortest paths while allowing the passage of faulty nodes. Simulation results show that, compared with conventional methods, the proposed method reduces average latency by about 44.5% and improves node utilization rate by about 41.2% for 3D mesh NoCs of 5×5×5 nodes.