Phoenix NoC: A distributed fault tolerant architecture

Abstract

The advances in deep submicron technology have made the development of large Multiprocessor Systems-on-Chip (MPSoC) possible and Networks-on-Chip (NoCs) have been recognized to provide an efficient communication architecture for such systems. With the positive effects on the device's integration some drawbacks arise, such as the increase of fault susceptibility during the MPSoC manufacturing and operation. This work presents Phoenix, which is a direct mesh NoC that implements fault tolerant mechanisms in order to enable end-to-end communication when some links fail. Phoenix implements a distributed fault tolerant mechanism in software (i.e. in each processor) and in hardware (i.e. in each router). Experimental results show that Phoenix is scalable and allows the MPSoC operation even in the presence of several faulty links.