29 January 2020 in IEEE Access
WiNoC has become a promising on-chip interconnect architecture. Due to the integration and manufacturing limits of wireless interconnects in nanotechnology, WiNoC systems are more susceptible to high failure rates. In this paper, we propose a novel fault-tolerant routing algorithm based on regional fault-aware techniques for link failures in WiNoC. We trade off performance and overhead by adopting 2-hop awareness for wireless nodes and 1-hop awareness for wired nodes. And the node status is not defined merely based on its own faulty condition but with a “double sensing” mechanism. Besides, since congestion is prone to occur around faulty nodes, we consider congestion mitigation in fault-tolerant algorithm design. Simulation results demonstrate that compared with several counterparts, the performance benefits clearly overweigh the overhead with acceptable area increase. The newly proposed routing algorithm significantly enhances the robustness of the system.
30 May 2025 in IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems
Strong physical unclonable functions (PUFs) are promising circuits for lightweight Internet of Things (IoT) authentication and security. However, existing strong PUFs exhibit very low cryptographic nonlinearity (NL), making them vulnerable to machine learning (ML) modeling and cryptanalytic attack. To address this issue, we propose the Bent function PUF (BF PUF) based on Maiorana-McFarland (M-M) constructed Bent functions, which obfuscates the responses of the strong PUF to enhance resistance against modeling attacks. The core idea is to employ the M-M construction method for Bent functions to ensure maximum cryptographic NL to resist modeling attacks. A Feistel network is configured using weak PUF responses as keys to achieve device-specific and unpredictable mappings of input challenges while meeting the requirements of the M-M Bent function construction. A Python-based model of the BF PUF was developed, and simulation results indicate that the cryptographic NL of the proposed BF PUF outperforms k-xor arbiter PUFs (APUFs) ( ${k} =2$ , 4, 6). The proposed BF PUF was also implemented and evaluated on the FPGA hardware platform. The experimental results show that under modeling attacks using four ML algorithms—logistic regression (LR), artificial neural networks (ANNs), deep neural networks (DNNs), and covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategies (CMA-ES)—the best prediction accuracy under these four modeling attack algorithms is 52.60%. The reliability under temperature fluctuations ranging from $- 10~^{\circ }$ C to $80~^{\circ }$ C is between 84.20% and 99.78%.
22 February 2023 in IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems
As technology feature sizes diminish to the nanometer regime, the leakage power crisis has become a major challenge in network-on-chip (NoC) design. Power gating (PG) is used to mitigate growing leakage power as an effective static power-saving technique. Applying PG in a multiple NoC (Multi-NoC) rather than a traditional NoC is a promising solution. However, limited by the channel width of the subnets, the increase in packet length will bring a severe serialization issue and performance loss. Previous Multi-NoC schemes have to wake up more subnets to minimize the performance loss, which also sacrifices their energy efficiency. In this article, we introduce an architecture, namely, BandExp , which allows subnets to expand their bandwidth by utilizing the idle physical links of other subnets. More bandwidth helps subnets mitigate the serialization issue and reduce the performance loss. Meanwhile, other subnets gain longer sleep cycles and thus save more energy. Evaluation results indicate that compared to the state-of-the-art Catnap , the proposed architecture reduces the average packet latency and execution time of different benchmarks by 19.3% and 3.2%, respectively. Also, the net static energy of the network is reduced by 23.2% on average, while the incurred area overhead is only 1.3%.
16 October 2023 in IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems
As chip fabrication has advanced to the nano level, the increased link density has heightened the risk of failures. The potential performance drawbacks resulting from these link failures have become a critical challenge in the design of reliable network-on-chip (NoC) systems. Fault-tolerant routing algorithms have proven to be effective strategies for handling this issue by diverting packets away from failed links to prevent congestion. However, these algorithms often result in excessive packet diversion, especially in the presence of a higher failure rate, which can significantly constrain the network’s behavior. This article introduces a novel NoC design with reconfigurable multifunctional channels (RMC_NoC). This design dynamically adapts the channel functions in response to network conditions to ensure that packets from failed links follow their original paths. In addition, it presents a channel buffer bubble flow control mechanism that can resolve congestion by redistributing congested traffic within the channel buffer. The evaluation results demonstrate that our approach ensures superior network communication even in the presence of permanent link failures, with minimal area overhead and power consumption. Moreover, our system exhibits lower latency and higher throughput compared to state-of-the-art fault-tolerant methods across various link failure rates. Notably, even at a severe failure rate of 30%, RMC_NoC exhibits only a 16.3% increase in latency compared to an ideal failure-free environment (Baseline) while still maintaining system communication capabilities to a considerable extent.
22 October 2022 in Integration