Reliable NoC design with low latency and power consumption

Abstract

Reliability has become one of the most crucial issues in network-on-chip (NoC). But how to keep low latency and power consumption when achieving reliability is still a curial challenge. A novel scheme for reliable NoCs is proposed. In the scheme, header flit is protected from router to router and data is protected from end to end. To implement the scheme, a new header protection buffer in routers is designed, which can check the timing errors and tolerate the soft errors simultaneously. Instead of checking on each router, data packet is only decoded and checked on receiver's network interface. In this way, the scheme ensures reliable transmission with low latency and power consumption. Experimental results show the feasibility of the proposed scheme in terms of power consumption, latency and area cost.