Exploration of a reconfigurable 2D mesh network-on-chip architecture and a topology reconfiguration algorithm

A novel reconfigurable 2D mesh Network-on-Chip (NoC) architecture (REmesh) and a topology reconfiguration algorithm (TRARE) are proposed in this paper. Compared with a conventional 2D mesh, REmesh, which employs a few more routers and multiplexers, can be easily reconfigured to restore a 2D mesh topology to tolerant core faults in NoCs. Based on REmesh, TRARE repeatedly categorizes routers, connects cores with routers, and eventually finds out a reconfiguration solution. Simulation results show that in the topologies which sizes do not exceed 7×8, more than 90% successful reconfiguration rate can be guaranteed when less than 9% of the total cores are faulty. Simulation also suggests that when the number of faulty cores reaches the number of redundant cores, more redundancy should be added to ensure high successful reconfiguration rate.