Reliable Network-on-Chip Using a Low Cost Unequal Error Protection Code

The network-on-chip (NoC) paradigm is seen as a way of facilitating the integration of a large number of computational and storage blocks on a chip to meet several performance and power constraints. However due to continued scaling of process technologies, the devices and interconnects have become more susceptible to single event upsets. This paper presents a low cost error correcting code based technique to protect NoC routers against single event upset induced soft errors. An unequal protection error correcting code based methodology is provided for the most commonly used store-and-forward routing strategy. The proposed codes have the same check bit overhead as the conventional single error correcting (SEC) code. The encoding/decoding overhead and latency are also similar to the conventional low cost SEC code. The proposed codes belong to the class of unequal error protection codes as they provide different levels of error correction capability for different portions of the same packet with more protection for the important parts of the data.