Towards On-chip Fault-tolerant Communication

TitleTowards On-chip Fault-tolerant Communication
Publication TypeConference Papers
Year of Publication2003
AuthorsDumitras T, Kerner S, M\uarculescu R
Conference NameASP-DAC '03 Proceedings of the 2003 Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference
Date Published2003///
PublisherACM
ISBN Number0-7803-7660-9
Abstract

As CMOS technology scales down into the deep-submicron (DSM) domain, devices and interconnects are subject to new types of malfunctions and failures that are harder to predict and avoid with the current system-on-chip (SoC) design methodologies. Relaxing the requirement of 100% correctness in operation drastically reduces the costs of design but, at the same time, requires SoCs be designed with some degree of system-level fault-tolerance. In this paper, we introduce a high-level model of DSM failure patterns and propose a new communication paradigm for SoCs, namely stochastic communication. Specifically, for a generic tile-based architecture, we propose a randomized algorithm which not only separates computation from communication, but also provides the required fault-tolerance to on-chip failures. This new technique is easy and cheap to implement in SoCs that integrate a large number of communicating IP cores.

URLhttp://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1119772.1119817