Reliability Analysis of On-Chip Communication Architectures: An MPEG-2 Video Decoder Case Study

In this paper, we present reliability analysis and comparison between on-chip communication architectures: dominant shared-bus AMBA and emerging network-on-chip (NoC); in the presence of single-event upsets (SEUs) using MPEG-2 video decoder as a case study. Employing System C-based fault simulations, reliability of the decoders is studied in terms of SEUs experienced in the computation cores and communication interconnects. We show that for a given soft error rate (SER), NoC-based decoder experiences lower SEUs than AMBA-based decoder. Using peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and frame error ratio (FER) metrics to evaluate the impact of SEUs at application-level, we show that NoC-based decoder gives up to 4dB higher PSNR, while AMBA experiences upto 3% lower FER. Furthermore, we investigate the impact of routing, application task mapping (distribution of tasks among computation cores) and architecture allocation (choice of number of computation cores) on the reliability of the decoders in the presence of SEUs