Congestion aware, fault tolerant, and thermally efficient inter-layer communication scheme for hybrid NoC-bus 3D architectures

Three-dimensional IC technology offers greater device integration and shorter interlayer interconnects. In order to take advantage of these attributes, 3D stacked mesh architecture was proposed which is a hybrid between packet-switched network and a bus. Stacked mesh is a feasible architecture which provides both performance and area benefits, while suffering from inefficient intermediate buffers. In this paper, an efficient architecture to optimize system performance, power consumption, and reliability of stacked mesh 3D NoC is proposed. The mechanism benefits from a congestion-aware and bus failure tolerant routing algorithm called AdaptiveZ for vertical communication. In addition, we hybridize the proposed adaptive routing with available algorithms to mitigate the thermal issues by herding most of the switching activities closer to the heat sink. Our extensive simulations with synthetic and real benchmarks, including the one with an integrated video-conference application, demonstrate significant power, performance, and peak temperature improvements compared to a typical stacked mesh 3D NoC.