Reliable and adaptive network-on-chip architectures for cyber physical systems

Reliability in embedded systems is crucial for many application domains. Especially, for safety critical application, as they can be found in the automotive and avionic domain, a high reliability has to be ensured. The technology in chip production undergoes a steady shrinking process from nowadays 25 nanometers. It is proven that coming technologies, which are much smaller, can have a higher defect rate after production, but also at runtime. The physical effects at runtime come from a higher susceptibility for radiation. Since the silicon die of a field programmable gate array (FPGA) includes a high amount of physical wiring, the radiation effect plays here a major role. Therefore, this article describes an approach of a reliable Network-on-Chip (NoC) which can be used for an FPGA-based system. The article describes the concept and the physical realization of this NoC and evaluates its reliability.

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