Abstract—With the advent of the IoT age, low-power
technology inside chips is a prerequisite. As lower power
requirements have become important, network-on-chip (NoC)
architecture has also begun to adopt design techniques that use
a voltage frequency island (VFI), which is a low-power chip
design paradigm. While research on maximizing the energy
efficiency of NoC in the VFI environment has been performed,
studies on the lifetime enhancement of the chip are scarce. In
the previous research, the VFI routing scheme allocates a path
that minimizes the VFI region change among the shortest paths
because it considers only energy. However, if only the routing
based on the minimum route is performed, a hotspot occurs
owing to the traffic concentration, and the lifetime of the
specific link is deteriorated rapidly. We herein propose a
routing method that decreases the link failure probability and
increases the lifetime in VFI NoC. Our algorithm uses different
routing schemes for inter- and intra-communications to
distribute traffic as much as possible. The proposed method is
a routing method that can optimize energy consumption while
focusing on traffic distribution using different routing methods
according to each situation. This has resulted in an overall
energy efficient load balancing and increased lifetime. The
experimental results of mesh topology indicate that the
proposed routing method increases the mean time to failure by
31.78% and the energy overhead is 4.45%.
Index Terms—VFI NoC, lifetime improvement method,
aging aware routing, LAXY routing.
J. S. Kim is with Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon, Republic of Korea (e-mail:
karlema@skku.edu).
J. B. Hong and T. H. Han are with Department of Semiconductor and
Display Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon, Republic of
Korea, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon, Republic of Korea (e-mail: {adfffsa,
than}@skku.edu).
[PDF]
Cite: Ju Sung Kim, Jeong Beom Hong, and Tae Hee Han, "Intra and Inter Routing based Lifetime Improvement Method for VFI Network-on-Chip," International Journal of Information and Electronics Engineering vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 12-18, 2019.
