Marching into nano-scale technology, probability of soft errors and crosstalk faults has increased by about 6-7 times. Since buffers occupy about 40-90% of the switch area, the probability of soft errors in switches is significant. We propose a deflection-aware routing algorithm (DAR) combined with an information redundancy technique to cover the soft errors and crosstalk faults in the header flow control units (FLIT). We also introduce an interleaving method along with a simple hamming code to tolerate the errors in data and tail FLITs. The proposed methods have been evaluated in both circuit and simulation level through a simulator written in C++, Booksim 2, and Synopsys Design Compiler. The evaluation results show that we can cover the soft errors and crosstalk faults with reasonable power and performance overhead of 3% and 6.5% respectively.

Network on chip (NoC) is a scalable interconnection architecture for ever increasing communication demand between processing cores. However, in nanoscale technology size, NoC lifetime is limited due to aging processes of negative bias temperature instability, hot carrier injection, and electromigration. Usually, because of unbalanced utilization of NoC resources, some parts of the network experience more thermal stress and duty cycle in comparison with other parts, which may accelerate chip failure. To slow down the aging rate of NoC, this paper proposes an oblivious routing algorithm called location-based aging-resilient Xy-Yx (LAXY) to distribute packet flow over entire network. LAXY is based on the fact that dimension-ordered routing algorithms imposes the highest traffic load on the central nodes in mesh topologies. To balance the traffic over the network, certain routers at the east and the west of NoC, with dimension-order XY routing, statically are configured as YX. Various configurations have been explored for LAXY and the simulations show a specific configuration, called Fishtail, increases mean time to failure of the routers and interconnects by about 42% and 56%, respectively. Moreover, by balancing the load over the network, LAXY improves overall packet latency by about 7% in average, with negligible area overhead.

The severity of timing delay in the communication channels of Network on Chip (NoC) depends on the transition patterns appearing on the wires. An analytical model can estimate the timing delay in NoC channels in the presence of crosstalk faults. However, recently proposed analytical model does not have enough accuracy and is based on 3-wire delay model. In this paper, an Accurate Crosstalk Model (ACM) based on 5-wire delay model is proposed to estimate the delay of communication channels in the presence of crosstalk faults. ACM is more accurate due to considering more wires in the delay model and also considering the overlaps between locations of transition patterns.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are prone to faults due to battery depletion of nodes. A node failure can disturb routing as it plays a key role in transferring sensed data to the end users. This paper presents a Fault-Tolerant and Energy-Aware Mechanism (FTEAM), which prolongs the lifetime of WSNs. This mechanism can be applied to cluster-based WSN protocols. The main idea behind the FTEAM is to identify overlapped nodes and configure the most powerful ones to the sleep mode to save their energy for the purpose of replacing a failed Cluster Head (CH) with them. FTEAM not only provides fault tolerant sensor nodes, but also tackles the problem of emerging dead area in the network. Our experimental results and simulations show that FTEAM outperforms conventional protocols in terms of network lifetime and energy consumption. In addition, an analytical evaluation using the Markov model is performed to determine the reliability of the FTEAM.