Adaptive Error Control for NoC Switch-to-Switch Links in a Variable Noise Environment

Abstract

We present an adaptive error control method for switch-to-switch links in a variable noise environment, to meet reliability requirements and achieve energy-efficiency. Unlike worst-case error correction coding (ECC), the proposed method is capable of selecting the most effective ECC scheme based on predicted link quality at runtime. Our method configures the ECC codec to obtain the desired error correction strength using a set of single-error correction (SEC) codes combined with interleaving. The method can effectively handle multi-cycle and adjacent multi-wire errors existing on switch-to-switch links. An experimental case study shows that the adaptive method can increase the energy-efficiency by up to 19% over a fixed ECC scheme, for a given residual flit error rate. Furthermore, energy reduction affected by different multi-wire and multi-cycle noise scenarios are compared.