High-Performance and Fault-Tolerant 3D NoC-Bus Hybrid Architecture Using ARB-NET-Based Adaptive Monitoring Platform

The emerging three-dimensional integrated circuits (3D-ICs) achieve greater device integration and enhanced system performance at lower cost and reduced area footprint, thereby offering higher order of connectivity and greater design choices and possibilities. To exploit the intrinsic capability of reduced communication distances in 3D-ICs, three-dimensional NoC-bus hybrid mesh architecture was proposed. Besides its various advantages in terms of area, power consumption, and performance, this architecture has a unique and hitherto previously unexplored possibility to implement an efficient system-wide monitoring network. In this paper, an efficient three-dimensional NoC architecture is proposed which is optimized for system performance, power consumption, and reliability. The mechanism benefits from a congestion-aware and bus failure-tolerant routing algorithm called AdaptiveZ for vertical communication. In addition, we have integrated a low-cost monitoring platform on top of the three-dimensional NoC-Bus Hybrid mesh architecture that can be efficiently used for various system management purposes such as traffic monitoring, fault tolerance, and thermal management. The proposed generic monitoring platform called ARB-NET utilizes bus arbiters to exchange the monitoring information directly with each other without using the data network. As a test case, based on the proposed monitoring platform, a fully congestion-aware and interlayer fault-tolerant routing algorithm named AdaptiveXYZ is presented taking advantage of information generated within bus arbiters. Compared to recently proposed stacked mesh three-dimensional NoCs, our extensive simulations with synthetic and real benchmarks reveal that our architecture using the AdaptiveXYZ routing can help in achieving significant power, performance, and reliability improvements with a negligible hardware overhead.