Self-Healing Router Approach for High-Performance Network-on-Chip

Kasem Khalil,Magdy Bayoumi,Ashok Kumar,Omar Eldash

doi:10.1109/ojcas.2021.3095000

Kasem Khalil, Magdy Bayoumi + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1109/ojcas.2021.3095000

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Abstract

Network-on-Chip (NoC) is used as the communication network in many applications that use multiple cores or Processing Elements (PEs). Routers play a crucial role as connectors since a faulty router can degrade the NoC’s performance and cause miscommunication between the network’s components. Thus a faulty router may cause the system to fail. To avoid failure in routers in NoCs, a novel self-healing technique is proposed. Self-healing serves to recover hardware faults, and it is defined as the ability of a system to recover from its faults without any external intervention. The proposed self-healing method is to heal faulty routers and their port buffers of faults as they occur. The proposed method uses the neighboring routers of a faulty router for computation. The data packet includes three bits for routing. A neighbor’s active router updates these bits according to the destination of the packet. A self-healing block is added inside each router. The proposed method also covers faulty buffers, and it uses active buffers to store the packet of a faulty one. It has been implemented and tested using VHDL and Altera Arria 10 GX FPGA. It has been found to attain improved reliability and Mean Time to Failure (MTTF) at an area overhead of 27%. It has been tested for complex NoC structure, and the results show it is practical, scalable, stable, and robust.

Highlights

I N QUEST of increased performance, the semiconductor industry has been rapidly switching from a single microprocessor to multiple core architectures
This is enabled by a rapid reduction in the dimensions of the integrated circuit, which enables the placing of several components on a single chip
The results show the stability of the proposed method for complex NoC, which can be used for many applications

Summary

INTRODUCTION

I N QUEST of increased performance, the semiconductor industry has been rapidly switching from a single microprocessor to multiple core architectures. Motamedi et al [34] present a fault-tolerant NoC technique with reconfigurable architecture Their method is based on using redundancy to recover faulty components and increase reliability. Fick et al [36] propose a Vicis router architecture to recover permanent faults on routers and links Their method is based on using redundancy to repair router operation where it uses bypassing a faulty path and port swapping. These routing bits determine which port in the faulty router receives the packet from the active neighbors The proposed self-healing methods check which buffer has free slots, and the control block sends the packet of faulty buffer to the available buffer.

IMPLEMENTATION AND EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS

Findings

CONCLUSION