Abstract

As CMOS technology scales down into the deep-submicron (DSM) domain, the costs of design and verification for Systems-On-Chip (SoCs) are rapidly increasing due to the inefficiency of traditional CAD tools. Relaxing the requirement of 100% correctness for devices and interconnects drastically reduces the costs of design but, at the same time, requires that SoCs be designed with some systemlevel fault-tolerance. In this paper, we introduce a new communication paradigm for SoCs, namely stochastic communication. The newly proposed scheme not only separates communication from computation, but also provides the required built-in faulttolerance to DSM failures, is scalable and cheap to implement. For a generic tile-based architecture, we show how a ubiquitous multimedia application (an MP3 encoder) can be implemented using stochastic communication in an efficient and robust manner. More precisely, up to 70% data upsets, 80% packet drops because of buffer overflow, and severe levels of synchronization failures can be tolerated while maintaining a low latency.

Citations