Lifetime Improvement Method using Threshold-based Partial Data Compression in NoC

Network-on-chip (NoC) is widely used in the multiprocessor system-on-chip (MP-SoC) because it has advantages in parallel processing and scalability. However, as the transistor density and the volume of communication increase, maintaining the reliability is becoming a major challenge. Especially, heat generation due to heavy traffic is one of the main causes of reliability degradation, that accelerates aging of chips and results in permanent faults. In previous studies, mapping and routing methods had been used to distribute unbalanced traffic for extending the lifetime. However, these methods have a limitation because the overall amount of traffic is not changed. In this paper, we propose a method to extend the lifetime by threshold-based partially applied Huffman coding in order to reduce the total amount of traffic considering implementation overhead. Experimental results show that the traffic volume is reduced by 17.24 % on average, mean time to failure (MTTF) is increased by 13.55 % compared to that of the aging aware fully adaptive routing without compression.