2007 Volume 4 Issue 10 Pages 332-339
The decreasing manufacturing yield of integrated circuits, as a result of rising complexity and decreased feature size, and the emergence of NoC-based design techniques, has necessitated the search for network reconfiguration techniques for reusing NoCs with faulty communication hardware. In this paper, we propose a method to cope with the problem of faulty communication links in mesh-based NoCs. The method is based on the use of programmable routing tables, which has a fixed number of entries, in network switches. Experimental results show that a network reconfigured for fault masking by programming its routing tables has acceptable but degraded performance parameters as compared to the non-faulty network.