Selected Crosstalk Avoidance Code for Reliable Network-on-Chip

With the shrink of the technology into nanometer scale, network-on-chip (NOC) has become a reasonable solution for connecting plenty of IP blocks on a single chip. But it suffers from both crosstalk effects and single event upset (SEU), especially crosstalk-induced delay, which may constrain the overall performance of NOC. In this paper, we introduce a reliable NOC design using a code with the capability of both crosstalk avoidance and single error correction. Such a code, named selected crosstalk avoidance code (SCAC) in our previous work, joins crosstalk avoidance code (CAC) and error correction code (ECC) together through codeword selection from an original CAC codeword set. It can handle possible error caused by either crosstalk effects or SEU. When designing a reliable NOC, data are encoded to SCAC codewords and can be transmitted rapidly and reliably across NOC. Experimental results show that the NOC design with SCAC achieves higher performance and is reliable to tolerate single errors. Compared with previous crosstalk avoidance methods, SCAC reduces wire overhead, power dissipation and the total delay. When SCAC is used in NOC, it can save 20% area overhead and reduce 49% power dissipation.% than the previous methods could.