Area-efficient synthesis of fault-secure NoC switches

This paper introduces a hybrid method to synthesize area-efficient fault-secure NoC switches to detect all errors resulting from any single-point combinational or transition fault in switches and interconnect links. Firstly, the structural faults that are always detectable by data encoding at flit-level are identified. Next, the fault-secure structure is constructed with minimized area such that errors caused by the remaining faults are detected under any given input vector. The experimental evaluation shows significant area savings compared to conventional fault-secure schemes. In addition, the resulting structure can be reused for test compaction. This reduces the amount of test response data and test time without loss of fault coverage or diagnostic resolution.