PAM: A Packet Manipulation Mechanism for Mitigating Crosstalk Faults in NoCs

This paper proposes an efficient mechanism that mitigates crosstalk faults in Network-on-Chips (NoCs). This is done by using a Packet Manipulating mechanism called PAM for reliable data transfer of NoCs. PAM investigates the transitions of a packet to minimize the forbidden transition patterns appearing during the flit traversal in NoCs. To do this, the content of a packet is manipulated using three different manipulating mechanisms. In other words, PAM manipulates the content of packet in three manipulating modes including: vertical, horizontal and diagonal modes. Then, comparing the transitions of these manipulating mechanisms, a packet with minimum numbers of transitions is selected to be injected into the channel. A tag field is added to the manipulated packet in the sender to be recovered in the receiver. The evaluation of PAM shows that the proposed mechanism can mitigate crosstalk faults with fewer overheads with respect to the other state-of-the art crosstalk mitigating mechanism.