Towards a scalable and reliable wireless network-on-chip

Multi-core platforms are emerging trends in the design of Systems-on-Chip (SoCs). Interconnect fabrics for these multi-core SoCs play a crucial role in achieving the target performance. The Network-on-Chip (NoC) paradigm has been proposed as a promising solution for designing the interconnect fabric of multi-core SoCs. But the performance requirements of NoC infrastructures in future technology nodes cannot be met by relying only on material innovation with traditional scaling. The continuing demand for low power and high speed interconnects with technology scaling necessitates looking beyond the conventional planar metal/dielectric-based interconnect infrastructures. Among different possible alternatives, the on-chip wireless communication network is envisioned as a revolutionary methodology, capable of bringing significant performance gains for multi-core SoCs. Wireless NoCs (WiNoCs) can be designed by using miniaturized on-chip antennas as an enabling technology. In this work, design methodologies and technology requirements for scalable WiNoC architectures are presented and their performance is evaluated. It is demonstrated that WiNoCs outperform their wired counterparts in terms of network throughput and latency, and that energy dissipation improves by orders of magnitude under various experimental and real-life scenarios. A major challenge that NoC design is expected to face is related to the intrinsic unreliability of the interconnect infrastructure under technology limitations. The devices and components of the WiNoCs are expected to suffer high failure rates. By incorporating error control coding (ECC) schemes along the interconnects, NoC architectures will be able to provide correct functionality even in the presence of different sources of transient noise and yet have low energy dissipation. In this work, designs of novel joint crosstalk avoidance and multiple error correction/detection codes as well as burst error correction codes are proposed and their performance is evaluated in different WiNoC fabrics. It is demonstrated that by using the proposed codes WiNoCs can achieve the same reliability as a wireline NoC with much less energy dissipation and higher performance.