Traditional bus-based interconnects are simple and easy to implement, but the scalability is greatly limited. While router-based networks-on-chip (NoCs) offer superior scalability, they also incur significant power and area overhead due to complex router structures. In this thesis, a new class of on-chip networks, referred to as Routerless (RL) NoCs, where routers are completely eliminated is explored. A novel design that utilizes on-chip wiring resources smartly to achieve comparable hop count and scalability to that of the router-based NoCs is proposed. Several effective techniques that significantly reduce the resource requirement to avoid new network abnormalities in routerless NoC designs are presented. Evaluation results show that, compared with a conventional mesh, the proposed routerless NoC achieves 9.5X reduction in power, 7.2X reduction in area, 2.5X reduction in zero-load packet latency, and 1.7X increase in throughput. In addition, compared with the state-of-the-art low-cost NoC design, the proposed approach achieves 7.7X reduction in power, 3.3X reduction in area, 1.3X reduction in zero-load packet latency, and 1.6X increase in throughput. Moreover, the shrinking features sizes due to technology innovation results in increasing link failure rates. For RL NoC this is a major concern due to a large number of wires that RL NoC employs. To address a solution to this problem, a fault tolerance technique for permanent link failures without using redundant wires is introduced and this technique requires a minimal overhead to the existing RL NoC. The performance of the technique after a fault recovery is extensively assessed using synthetic traffic patterns and PARSEC workloads. On average, latency is increased by 5.2% and 10.03% for synthetic patterns and PARSEC workloads, respectively. Moreover, this technique requires only an additional 4% area and 20.3% of total power
