AFTP: An Adaptive High Cost-Effectiveness Fault-Tolerant NoC Design Based on Prediction

Network-on-Chip (NoC), known for its high bandwidth and scalability, is extensively utilized in chip multiprocessors. However, as technology advances to the nanometer scale, NoC is becoming increasingly vulnerable to errors caused by crosstalk, radiation, electromagnetic interference, and other factors. In addition to ensuring network reliability, designers must consider the overhead instead of blindly pursuing fault-tolerance capabilities in NoC design. In this paper, we analyze the characteristics of conventional End-to-End (E2E) and Switch-to-Switch (S2S) designs and propose AFTP, an adaptive high cost-effectiveness fault-tolerant NoC design based on prediction. Our design prioritizes stronger protection for head flits and relaxed protection for body and tail flits, and it is capable of dynamically adjusting the decoding times for flits in response to changes in error rate, aiming to achieve a balance between the overhead and the reliability of NoC. Our design demonstrates a significant improvement in cost-effectiveness compared to conventional E2E and S2S designs, achieving a 5.9x and 8.9x improvement, respectively, under common synthetic traffic and PARSEC benchmarks.