LOFT: A low-overhead fault-tolerant routing scheme for 3D NoCs

• We propose a low-overhead fault-tolerant routing scheme called LOFT for 3D Mesh NoCs.
• LOFT adopts a novel flexible logic-based routing guided by a new fair 3D turn model.
• LOFT is a deadlock-free routing scheme without any expensive virtual channels (VCs).
• LOFT can achieve better performance, improved reliability and lower overhead of NoCs.
• LOFT is a scalable scheme for other 3D NoCs of regular or irregular topologies.

As one of the main trends of communication technology for 3D integrated circuits, the 3D networks-on-chip (NoCs) have drawn high concern from the academia. The links are main components of the NoCs. For the permanent link faults, the fault-tolerant routing scheme has been regarded as an effective mechanism to ensure the performance of the 2D NoCs. In this paper, we propose a low-overhead fault-tolerant routing scheme called LOFT for 3D Mesh NoCs without requiring any virtual channels (VCs). LOFT is a deadlock-free scheme by adopting a logic-based routing named LBDRe2 guided by a turn model Complete-OE. The experimental results show that LOFT possesses better performance, improved reliability and lower overhead compared with the state-of-the-art reliable routing schemes.