A Survey on Design Approaches to Circumvent Permanent Faults in Networks-on-Chip

Increasing fault rates in current and future technology nodes coupled with on-chip components in the hundreds calls for robust and fault-tolerant Network-on-Chip (NoC) designs. Given the central role of NoCs in today’s many-core chips, permanent faults impeding their original functionality may significantly influence performance, energy consumption, and correct operation of the entire system. As a result, fault-tolerant NoC design gained much attention in recent years. In this article, we review the vast research efforts regarding a NoC’s components, namely, topology, routing algorithm, router microarchitecture, as well as system-level approaches combined with reconfiguration; discuss the proposed architectures; and identify outstanding research questions.