Abstract
As CMOS technology scales down into the deep-submicron (DSM) domain, the costs of design
and verification for Systems-on-Chip (SoCs) are rapidly increasing. Relaxing the requirement of 100% correctness
for devices and interconnects drastically reduces the costs of design but, at the same time, requires
SoCs to be designed with some degree of system-level fault-tolerance. Towards this end, this paper introduces a
novel communication paradigm for SoCs, called stochastic communication. This scheme separates communication
from computation by allowing the on-chip interconnect to be designed as a reusable IP and also provides a
built-in tolerance to DSM failures, without a significant performance penalty. By using this communication
scheme, a large percentage of data upsets, packet losses due to buffers overflow, and severe levels of synchronization
failures can be tolerated, while providing high levels of performance.