A new architecture for online error detection and isolation in network on chip

Abstract

The Network-on-Chip (NoC) has become a promising communication infrastructure for Multiprocessors-System-on-Chip (MPSoC). Reliability is a main concern in NoC and performance is degraded when NoC is susceptible to faults. A fault can be determined as a cause of deviation from the desired operation of the system (error). To deal with these reliability challenges, this work propose OFDIM (Online Fault Detection and Isolation Mechanism),a novel combined methodology to tolerate multiple permanent and transient faults. The new router architecture uses two modules to assure highly reliable and low-cost fault-tolerant strategy. In contrast to existing works, our architecture presents less area, more fault tolerance, and high reliability. The reliability comparison using Silicon Protection Factor (SPF), shows 22-time improvement and that additional circuitry incurs an area overhead of 27%, which is better than state-of-the-art reliable router architectures. Also, the results show that the throughput decreases only by 5.19% and minor increase in average latency 2.40% while providing high reliability.