Network-on-Chip

Addresses the Challenges Associated with System-on-Chip Integration Network-on-Chip: The Next Generation of System-on-Chip Integration examines the current issues restricting chip-on-chip communication efficiency, and explores Network-on-chip (NoC), a promising alternative that equips designers with the capability to produce a scalable, reusable, and high-performance communication backbone by allowing for the integration of a large number of cores on a single system-on-chip (SoC). This book provides a basic overview of topics associated with NoC-based design: communication infrastructure design, communication methodology, evaluation framework, and mapping of applications onto NoC. It details the design and evaluation of different proposed NoC structures, low-power techniques, signal integrity and reliability issues, application mapping, testing, and future trends. Utilizing examples of chips that have been implemented in industry and academia, this text presents the full architectural design of components verified through implementation in industrial CAD tools. It describes NoC research and developments, incorporates theoretical proofs strengthening the analysis procedures, and includes algorithms used in NoC design and synthesis. In addition, it considers other upcoming NoC issues, such as low-power NoC design, signal integrity issues, NoC testing, reconfiguration, synthesis, and 3-D NoC design. This text comprises 12 chapters and covers: The evolution of NoC from SoC—its research and developmental challenges NoC protocols, elaborating flow control, available network topologies, routing mechanisms, fault tolerance, quality-of-service support, and the design of network interfaces The router design strategies followed in NoCs The evaluation mechanism of NoC architectures The application mapping strategies followed in NoCs Low-power design techniques specifically followed in NoCs The signal integrity and reliability issues of NoC The details of NoC testing strategies reported so far The problem of synthesizing application-specific NoCs Reconfigurable NoC design issues Direction of future research and development in the field of NoC Network-on-Chip: The Next Generation of System-on-Chip Integration covers the basic topics, technology, and future trends relevant to NoC-based design, and can be used by engineers, students, and researchers and other industry professionals interested in computer architecture, embedded systems, and parallel/distributed systems

Soft error analysis and mitigation in circuits involving C-elements

PhD ThesisA SEU or soft error is defined as a temporary error on digital electronics due to the effect of radiation. Such an error can cause system failure, e.g. a deadlock in an asynchronous system or production of incorrect outputs due to data corruption. The first part of this thesis studies the impact of process variation, temperature, voltage and size scaling within the same process on the vulnerability of the nodes of C-element circuits. The objectives are to identify vulnerable to SEU nodes inside a C-element and to find the critical charge needed to flip the output from low to high (0-1) and high to low (1-0) on different implementations of C-elements. In the second part, a framework to compute the SEU error rates is developed. The error rates of circuits are a trade-off between the size of the transistors and the total area of vulnerability. Comparisons of the vulnerability of different configurations of a C-element are made, and error rates are calculated. The third part focuses on soft error mitigation for single and dual rail latches. The latches are able to detect and correct errors due to SEU. The functionalities of the solutions have been validated by simulation. A comprehensive analysis of the performance of the latches under variations of the process and temperature are presented. The fourth part focuses on testing of the new latches. The objective is to design complex systems and incorporate both single rail and dual rail latches in the systems. Errors are injected in the latches and the functionality of the error correcting latches towards the SEU errors are observed at their outputs. The framework to compute error rates and soft error mitigation developed in this thesis can be used by designers in predicting the occurrence of soft error and mitigating soft error in systems