A fault-tolerant NoC scheme using bidirectional channel

Abstract

A novel Bidirectional Fault-Tolerant NoC (BFT-NoC) architecture capable of mitigating both static and dynamic channel failures is proposed. In a traditional NoC platform, a faulty data channel will force blocked packets to make costly detours, resulting in significant performance hits. In this work, novel fault-tolerance measures for a bidirectional NoC platform are proposed. The dynamically reconfigurable bidirectional channels of the BFT-NoC offer great flexibility to contain data-link permanent or transient faults while incurring negligible performance loss. Potential performance advantages in terms of failure rate reduction and reliability enhancement of the BFT-NoC architecture are carefully analyzed. Extensive experimental results clearly validate the fault-tolerance performance of BFT-NoC at both synthetic and real world network traffic patterns.