Dynamic Fault Tolerance Approach for Network-on-Chip Architecture

Network-on-Chip (NoC) architecture provides speed-efficient and scalable communication in complex integrated circuits. Attaining fault tolerance in NoC architectures is an ongoing research problem aiming to enhance the architecture’s reliability and performance. It seeks to mitigate the impact of router failures and enhance the overall system robustness. Fault tolerance is achieved by adding additional hardware, and the research challenge is to attain high reliability, high Mean Time To Failure (MTTF), and low Energy-Delay-Product (EDP) while sacrificing an acceptable area. It is particularly vital for applications with uninterrupted data flow. This paper proposes a fault-tolerance approach for NoC systems focusing on NoC routers to yield increased reliability and MTTF with an acceptable area overhead and low EDP. The proposed method proposes a dynamic reconfiguration mechanism by using a dynamic allocation of virtual channels and a bypass crossbar mechanism, ensuring uninterrupted data flow within the NoC. Evaluations of the proposed method are done on different mesh sizes using VHDL and an Altera 10GX FPGA, demonstrating the method’s superiority in reliability, reduced latency, and enhanced throughput. The results show that the proposed method has an acceptable area overhead of 25.3%, and its MTTF values are 3.7 times to 18 times higher than the traditional methods for varying network sizes, showing remarkable robustness against faults. The results show that the proposed method attains the best-reported reliability with the least EDP. Additionally, a layout of the circuit is also created and studied.