Smart-flooding: A novel scheme for fault-tolerant NoCs

The shrinking in device sizes brings about an increase in effects of noise sources and process variations, thus leading to increased faults and decreased chip yields in deep submicron systems. We propose a new fault-tolerant scheme called smart-flooding to fight both transient and permanent faults in networks-on-chips (NoCs). Smart-flooding tries to flood messages in cases where permanent faults have occurred, while end-to-end retransmission is used in cases of transient errors. Our experiments show that the proposed scheme exhibits a high performance while maintaining the level of fault-tolerance seen in regular flooding algorithm.