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Abstract-The reliability of networks-on-chip (NoC) is threatened by low yield and device wearout in aggressively scaled technology nodes. We propose ReliNoC, a network-on-chip architecture which can withstand failures, while maintaining not only basic connectivity, but also quality-of-service support based on packet priorities. Our network leverages a dual physical channel switch architecture which removes the control overhead of virtual channels (VCs) and utilizes the inherent redundancy within the 2-channel switch to provide spares for faulty elements. Experimental results show that ReliNoC provides 1.5 to 3 times better network physical connectivity in presence of several faults, and reduces the latency of both high and low priority traffic by 30 to 50%, compared to a traditional VC architecture. Moreover, it can tolerate up to 50 faults within an 8x8 mesh at only 10 and 40% latency overhead on control and data packets for PARSEC traces [24]. Synthesis results show that our reliable architecture incurs only 13% area overhead on the baseline 2-channel switch.

A new distributed on-line test mechanism for NoCs is proposed which scales to large-scale networks with general topologies and routing algorithms. Each router and its links are tested using neighbors in different phases. Only the router under test is in test mode and all other parts of the NoC are in functional mode.Experimental results show that our on-line test approach can detect stuck-at and short-wire faults in the routers and links. Our approach achieves 100% fault coverage for the data-path and 85% for the control paths including routing logic, FIFO's control path and the arbiter of a 5x5 router. Synthesis results show that the hardware overhead of our test components with TMR (Triple Module Redundancy) support is 20% for covering both stuck-at and short-wire faults and 7% for covering only stuck-at faults in the 5x5 router. Simulation results show that our on-line testing approach has an average latency overhead of 20% and 3% in synthetic traffic and PARSEC traffic benchmarks on an 8x8 NoC, respectively.