A reliable and high-performance Network-on-Chip router through decoupled resource sharing

Sustaining the functionality of routers as the main building block of Networks-on-Chip is of great importance especially against different environmental effects. The crossbar switch and the input ports are two main units inside a router in which the latter including the virtual channel buffers has a higher failure probability because of consuming the largest portion of the router's area. In this paper, we present a fault tolerant router micro-architecture based on utilizing a decoupled resource sharing approach in input ports as well as a new fault tolerant crossbar switch. The proposed router tolerates multiple permanent faults in the input ports and the crossbar switch with a negligible hardware overhead. The results based on Silicon Protection Factor (SPF) show that the proposed router provides a higher degree of fault tolerance compared to previous designs while offering lower packet latency in mesh based networks.