A Low-Power and SEU-Tolerant Switch Architecture for Network on Chips

High reliability, high performance, low power consumption are the main objectives in the design of NoCs. These three design objectives are mostly conflicting and should be considered simultaneously in order to have an optimal design. This paper proposes a method based on duplicating the virtual channels of each NoC node as well as parity codes to prevent SEUs from producing erroneous data. The method is compared with two widely used SEU-tolerant methods i.e., the switch to switch and the end to end flow control methods, in terms of reliability, power consumption and performance. A flit level VHDL-based simulator and Synopsys power compiler tool have been used to extract experimental results. The simulation results show the same reliability for all three methods, while the proposed method shows the lowest power consumption and the highest performance almost in all traffic generation rates and all packet error rates.