Defender: A Low Overhead and Efficient Fault-Tolerant Mechanism for Reliable on-Chip Router

Abstract

The ever-shrinking size of a transistor has made Network on Chip (NoC) susceptible to faults. A single error in the NoC can disrupt the entire communication. In this paper, we introduce Defender, a fault-tolerant router architecture, that is capable of tolerating permanent faults in all the parts of the router. We intend to employ structural modifications in baseline router design to achieve fault tolerance. In Defender we provide the fault tolerance to the input ports and routing computation unit by grouping the neighboring ports together. Default winner strategy is used to provide fault resilience to the virtual channel arbiters and switch allocators. Multiple routes are provided to the crossbar to tolerate the faults. Defender provides improved fault tolerance to all stages of routers as compared to the currently prevailing fault tolerant router architectures. Reliability analysis using silicon protection factor (SPF) and Mean Time to Failure (MTTF) metrics confirms that our proposed design Defender is 10.78 times more reliable than baseline unprotected router and then the current state of the art architectures.