High Performance Fully Adaptive Runtime Thermal-Aware Routing Algorithm for 3D NoC

Thermal problem is an essential issue which must be taken into account in the 3D Network-on-Chip (NoC) design, because it has a great impact on not only the network performance, but also the reliability of the message transmission. Runtime thermal management (RTM) is widely used to control the temperature by throttling some overheated routers in the network. In this work, we present a fully adaptive runtime thermal-aware routing algorithm for RTM, which combines the distance, traffic state, path diversity and the thermal impact in the path determination. By simultaneously considering all these factors, the routing algorithm can effectively balance the traffic load while keeping high adaptivity and routability, which also results in an even distribution of temperature across the network. To get the throttling information, instead of collecting the topology of the whole network, we utilize a 12 bits register to reserve the router state for one hop away, which saves the hardware cost largely and decreases the network latency. The simulation results show our proposed routing algorithm can improve the latency and energy consumption by comparing with other previously proposed thermal-aware routing schemes, and the improvement is more remarkable in large scale networks.