Tackling voltage emergencies in NoC through timing error resilience

Abstract

Aggressive technology scaling exacerbates the problem of voltage emergencies in emerging MPSoC systems. Network-on-Chips, the de-facto standard for connecting on-chip components in forthcoming devices play a central role in providing robust and reliable communication. In this work, we propose DrNoC (droop resilient network-on-chip)-two microarchitectural techniques to mitigate voltage emergency-induced timing errors in NoCs and preserve error-free communication throughout the network. DrNoC employs frequency downscaling and a pipeline error-recovery mechanism to reclaim corrupted flits in the router. Compared to the recently proposed NSFTR fault-tolerant technique, DrNoC offers a 27% improvement in energy-delay efficiency.