A prefetching scheme for Automatic Repeat-reQuest fault-tolerant on-chip network

In a fault-tolerant on-chip network, overhead due to the Automatic Repeat-reQuest (ARQ) operation may significantly impact the performance. In this work, an intelligent prefetching scheme that can effectively mitigate the performance hits from the ARQ overhead is proposed. Specifically, a packet-based retransmission scheme is incorporated to improve payload utilization while using Error-Detecting Code (EDC). A Virtual Cut-Through (VCT) switching is implemented to alleviate drastic performance degradation in dealing with the damaged data caused by noise upsets during packet transmissions. Potential performance advantages in terms of packet latency and transmission throughput were carefully analyzed to validate the practice of our proposed prefetching scheme in the designed network on-chip systems.