Network-on-chip non-preemptive test scheduling

Abstract

Network-on-Chip (NoC) is an emerging design paradigm in complex system-on-chips (SoCs) containing numerous built-in cores. Since NoCs have some outstanding features regarding design complexity, timing scalability, and power dissipation, widespread interest in this novel paradigm is likely to grow. The reuse of on-chip network as test access mechanism has been proposed to handle the growing complexity for testing NoC-based systems. However, the NoC reuse is limited by the on-chip routing resources and various constraints. Therefore, efficient test scheduling methods are required to deliver feasible test time while meeting all the constraints. In this project, a new efficient test scheduling algorithm for NoCbased systems is proposed that can minimize the total test time. The proposed algorithm is more towards non-preemptive tests in terms of packet format by first considering the core that has biggest test time. The inherent parallelism within a NoC itself could be exploited to transport test data to IPs under test. The NoC switch and all interconnects are assumed fault free. This is to improve the efficiency by transporting test data on multiple paths and testing multiple NoC IPs concurrently. Experimental results for the ITC’02 SoC test benchmarks show that the nonpreemptive scheduling based on dedicated path able to give competitive results.