ECDR2: Error Corrector and Detector Relocation Router for Network-on-Chip

Abstract

Network-on-chip (NoC) is commonly used in modern many-core systems due to their high bandwidth and flexibility. As the manufacturing process keeps scaling, the reliability challenge in NoCs increases as well. The error correction code (ECC) is widely adopted in error correction NoCs to improve the data correctness. At the same time, extra stages are introduced in the router pipeline to improve the error correction capability. As a result, conventional error correction routers suffer from high network latency. Motivated by this limitation, i.e., we remove the extra pipeline stages delicately introduced for error correction. We propose an error correction router, called error corrector and detector relocation router (ECDR2), whose architecture optimizes the pipeline flow of the router. As a result, it can achieve both low latency and high error correction.Experimental results show that, compared with the baseline design, ECDR $^{2}$ 2 obtains 13.67 and 39.4 percent less average latency under the uniform traffic pattern and Dedup benchmark, respectively, in an 8 × 8 mesh NoC. The circuit area of ECR is also 7.9 percent less than that of the baseline design under 45-nm technology.