Soft-Error-Immune Communication Network using Unbalanced Protection Selection

Complexity in digital systems is pushing the system design more and more toward the two almost separate phases, design of computational units and design of communication structures for connecting these units. As technology grows, these communication networks become more complex and require protection for their reliability. On the other hand, by shrinking transistor geometries, the effects of soft errors are expected to become more significant than before. This paper estimates the vulnerability of MPSoC’s communication infrastructure in form of silence data corruption failure in time (SDC FIT), and then uses a protection method for transient faults on interconnects that have SDC FIT values higher than a threshold value. Setting the threshold value, which is a tradeoff between reliability of interconnects and protection overheads, depends on of the application’s constraints that is its measure of susceptibility to soft errors.