Deadlock-Recovery Support for Fault-tolerant Routing Algorithms in 3D-NoC Architectures

In this paper, we present a low-cost deadlock-recovery technique for fault-tolerant routing algorithms in 3-dimensional Networks-on-Chip (3D-NoC) systems, called Random-Access-Buffer (RAB). RAB detects the presence of deadlock in the buffer and removes it with no considerable performance drop. The proposed deadlock-recovery technique was implemented on our earlier designed 3D-NoC system (3D-OASIS-NoC), which adopts Look-Ahead-Fault-Tolerant routing algorithm (LAFT). Evaluation results show that, at low fault-rates, the proposed technique does not affect the performance when compared to the previous system. At high fault-rates, RAB manages to avoid deadlock while the earlier system fails and the communication is blocked. The benefits acquired with RAB comes with only small extra hardware illustrated in 7% additional area and a slight 3.5% power overhead when compared to the previous 3D-OASIS-NoC system.