Dugdugi: An Optimal Fault Addressing Scheme for Octagon-Like On-Chip Communication Networks

Abstract

Network-on-chip (NoC) has emerged as a scalable on-chip communication platform and, hence, has become more popular. However, as the sole communication medium, a single point of failure raised by any permanent fault can cause the failure of the entire system. Subsequently, the NoC has become a critically exposed unit that must be protected. This article primarily presents a test-time-independent and optimally distributed test scheme named 'Dugdugi' that addresses channel faults, e.g., short in an Octagon and similar NoC architectures to achieve high reliability. The proposed scheme is extended to cover other channel faults, such as stuck-at and transient faults, to give its impression of a comprehensive approach. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme incurs little hardware area and detects all modeled short faults by a few clocks with achieving fault coverage metric up to 100%. Online evaluation reveals the effect of channel-short faults on various network performance metrics. In comparison to prior methodologies, the proposed scheme improves hardware area overhead up to 71.79% and reduces test time over 94.20%. Furthermore, performance overhead, such as packet latency and energy consumption, reduces up to 40.85% and 43.87%, respectively. © 1993-2012 IEEE.