Quality-of-service and error control techniques for mesh-based network-on-chip architectures

Network-on-a-chip (NoC) has been proposed as a solution for addressing the design challenges of future high-performance system-on-chip architectures in the nanoscale regime. Many real-time applications require input data that arrives with low delay jitter. Such communication traffic can only be supported by incorporating multiple levels of service in the interconnection network. Further, as technology scales toward deep submicron, on-chip interconnects are becoming more and more sensitive to noise sources such as power supply noise, crosstalk, and radiation induced effects, that are likely to reduce the reliability of data. Hence, effective error control schemes are required for ensuring data integrity. This paper addresses two important aspects of NoC architectures, quality of service and error control schemes and makes the following contributions: (i) it presents techniques for supporting guaranteed throughput (for low delay jitter traffic) and best-effort traffic quality levels in NoC router, (ii) it presents architectures for integrating error control schemes in the NoC router architecture, and (iii) it presents cycle accurate power and performance models of the two architecture enhancements for a mesh based NoC architecture.