A Delay Model and Speculative Architecture for Pipelined Routers
HPCA '01 Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture
BIST for Network-on-Chip Interconnect Infrastructures
VTS '06 Proceedings of the 24th IEEE VLSI Test Symposium
A Gracefully Degrading and Energy-Efficient Modular Router Architecture for On-Chip Networks
Proceedings of the 33rd annual international symposium on Computer Architecture
Fully Adaptive Fault-Tolerant Routing Algorithm for Network-on-Chip Architectures
DSD '07 Proceedings of the 10th Euromicro Conference on Digital System Design Architectures, Methods and Tools
A Lightweight Fault-Tolerant Mechanism for Network-on-Chip
NOCS '08 Proceedings of the Second ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Networks-on-Chip
Self-Configuration and Reachability Metrics in Massively Defective Multiport Chips
IOLTS '08 Proceedings of the 2008 14th IEEE International On-Line Testing Symposium
Vicis: a reliable network for unreliable silicon
Proceedings of the 46th Annual Design Automation Conference
Outstanding research problems in NoC design: system, microarchitecture, and circuit perspectives
IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
This work addresses the general problem of making Network-on-Chips (NoCs) routers totally self-healing in massively defective technologies. There are three main contributions. First, we propose a new hardware approach based on Built-In Self-Test techniques and multi-functional blocks (called Universal Logic Blocks, ULBs) to autonomously diagnose permanent faults and repair faulty units. ULBs have the capability to assume the functionality of various functional units within the router through simple reconfiguration and thus enable the repair of multiple permanent faults within the NoC router. Second, we propose a new reliability metric and introduce a probabilistic model to estimate the router reliability improvement achieved by the protection circuitry. Third, we compare our architecture to two router architectures (Vicis and Bulletproof) and we show that our design provides superior reliability improvement especially in extremely defective nanoscale technologies (i.e., typically above 30% of faulty routers). The most striking result is that the self-healing of the routers enables maintaining the communications at fault levels, where it is normally impossible to preserve communications.