From online fault detection to fault management in Network-on-Chips: A ground-up approach

Due to the ongoing miniaturization of silicon technology beyond the sub-micron domain and the trend of integrating ever more components on a single chip, the Network-on-Chip (NoC) paradigm has emerged to address the scalability and performance shortcomings of bus-based interconnects. As the feature size shrinks, the system gets much more susceptible to faults caused by wear-out and environmental effects. Thus, in order to increase the reliability, creates the need for having mechanisms embedded into such a system that could detect and manage the faults in run-time. In this paper, a ground-up approach from fault detection to fault management for such a NoC-based system on chip is proposed that utilizes both local fault management for fast reaction to faults and a global fault management mechanisms for triggering a large-scale reconfiguration of the NoC. Also, detailed description of strategies for fault detection, localization, classification and propagation to a global fault management unit are provided and methods for local fault management are elaborated.