Complex network inspired fault-tolerant NoC architectures with wireless links

The Network-on-Chip (NoC) paradigm has emerged as a scalable interconnection infrastructure for modern multi-core chips. However, with growing levels of integration, the traditional NoCs suffer from high latency and energy dissipation in on-chip data transfer due to conventional metal/dielectric based interconnects. Three-dimensional integration, on-chip photonic, RF and wireless links have been proposed as radical low-power and low-latency alternatives to the conventional planar wire-based designs. Wireless NoCs with Carbon Nanotube (CNT) antennas are shown to outperform traditional wire based NoCs by several orders of magnitude in power dissipation and latency. However such transformative technologies will be prone to high levels of faults and failures due to various issues related to manufacturing and integration. On the other hand, several naturally occurring complex networks such as colonies of microbes and the internet are known to be inherently fault-tolerant against high rates of failures and harsh environments. This paper proposes to adopt such complex network based architectures to minimize the effect of wireless link failures on the performance of the NoC. Through cycle accurate simulations it is shown that the wireless NoC architectures inspired by natural complex networks perform better than their conventional wired counterparts even in the presence of a high degree of faults.