Deadlock Recovery in Asynchronous Networks on Chip in the Presence of Transient Faults

—Asynchronous Networks-on-Chip (NoCs) have been proposed as a promising infrastructure to provide scalable and efficient on-chip communication for many-core systems. Using the Quasi-delay-insensitive (QDI) implementation, asynchronous NoCs could achieve timing-robustness. However, the advancing semiconductor technology leads to shrinking transistor dimensions and increasing chip density, accelerating the occurrence of faults, especially transient faults. Transient faults emerging on QDI circuits could cause not only data errors (symbol corruption and insertion), but also deadlock. When the deadlock happens on asynchronous NoCs, it can spread over the whole network and paralyse its function. This deadlock has not been fully studied while most traditional fault-tolerant techniques cannot deal with it. Using a new model built for QDI pipelines, the formation and behaviour of the deadlock caused by transient faults are systematically studied. Using the summarized deadlock patterns, the ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: ASYNC
• Authors: Guangda Zhang, Jim D. Garside, Wei Song 0002, Javier Navaridas, Zhiying Wang
• Keywords: ASYNC 2015, Hardware