%0 Conference Paper %B Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference and Exhibition, 2003 %D 2003 %T On-chip stochastic communication [SoC applications] %A Tudor Dumitras %A Marculescu, R. %K buffer overflow %K CMOS technology %K CMOS technology scaling %K Costs %K data upsets %K Design automation %K Digital audio players %K Fault tolerance %K Fault tolerant systems %K generic tile-based architecture %K integrated circuit design %K integrated circuit interconnections %K interconnect correctness requirements %K Logic Design %K logic simulation %K MP3 encoder %K Multiprocessor interconnection networks %K on-chip fault-tolerance %K on-chip stochastic communication %K packet drops %K Pervasive computing %K Robustness %K SoC design %K SoC verification %K Stochastic processes %K Synchronisation %K synchronization failures %K system latency %K system-level fault-tolerance %K system-on-chip %K systems-on-chip %K video coding %X As CMOS technology scales down into the deep-submicron (DSM) domain, the costs of design and verification for systems-on-chip (SoCs) are rapidly increasing due to the inefficiency of traditional CAD tools. Relaxing the requirement of 100% correctness for devices and interconnects drastically reduces the costs of design but, at the same time, requires that SoCs be designed with some system-level fault-tolerance. In this paper, we introduce a new communication paradigm for SoCs, namely stochastic communication. The newly proposed scheme not only separates communication from computation, but also provides the required built-in fault-tolerance to DSM failures, is scalable and cheap to implement. For a generic tile-based architecture, we show how a ubiquitous multimedia application (an MP3 encoder) can be implemented using stochastic communication in an efficient and robust manner. More precisely, up to 70% data upsets, 80% packet drops because of buffer overflow, and severe levels of synchronization failures can be tolerated while maintaining a low latency. %B Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference and Exhibition, 2003 %P 790 - 795 %8 2003/// %G eng