A Non-Minimal Routing Algorithm for Aging Mitigation in 2D-Mesh NoCs

Due to technology scaling, aging issue is becoming one of major concerns in the design of network-on-chip (NoC). The imbalanced workload distribution and routing algorithm cause aging hotspots, where a certain group of routers have higher aging effect than others. This can possibly lead to shorter lifetime of NoC. Most existing aging-aware routing algorithms are based on minimal routing, which suffers from less degree of adaptiveness compared to non-minimal routing. Thus, they are inefficient to mitigate the aging effect of routers. In this paper, we propose to use a non-minimal routing scheme to detour the traffic away from the aging hotspots, with the objective of mitigating the aging effect for NoCs. The problem is formulated as a bottleneck shortest path problem and solved using a dynamic programming approach. Finally, the experimental results show that compared to the state-of-the-art aging-aware routing algorithm, the non-minimal routing algorithm has up to 20% lifetime improvement for hotspot traffic patterns and realistic workload traces.