Robust Concurrent Online Testing of Network-on-Chip-Based SoCs

Lifetime concerns for complex systems-on-a-chip (SoC) designs due to decreasing levels in reliability motivate the development of solutions to ensure reliable operation. A precursor to any proposed recovery scheme would require the identification of failures in the system. Non-concurrent in-field testing is an impractical solution due to prohibitive costs in terms of test power and test time. This novel research proposes the use of concurrent online testing (COLT) to circumvent these issues. A test infrastructure-intellectual property (TI-IP) is deployed within network-on-chip (NoC)-based SoC designs to provide online test support while managing intrusion of test into executing applications within the system. This research describes the architecture and operation of a TI-IP capable of COLT. To address scalability of this solution, we show how these would operate when more than one is deployed in an SoC. In the absence of benchmarks for the analysis of COLT, two baseline and eight TI-IP...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: TVLSI
• Authors: Praveen Bhojwani, Rabi N. Mahapatra
• Keywords: Non-concurrent In-field Testing, Solution, Test Infrastructure-intellectual Property, TVLSI 2008