Improving Fault Tolerance of Network-on-Chip Links via Minimal Redundancy and Reconfiguration

We propose to partition links in a network-on-chip into multiple segments and use spare wires at the level of each segment to address permanent errors due to manufacturing or wear out defects. Because different segments of the spare wires address different errors from different segments, the proposed reconfigurable link structure can tolerate a larger number of errors with a reduced number of spare wires. The proposed self-repairing segmented link structure is implemented and simulated in Verilog and verified on a Virtex 5 FPGA. Experimental results on area, power consumption, delay, and reliability show that the optimal link is achieved when the link is partitioned into two segments.