Heaping of Sorrow Upon Sorrow

Abstract

With the continuous dimension shrinkage, the communication channels of networks-on-chip (NoCs) are often vulnerable to many logic level manufacturing faults resulting in miscellaneous system-level failures. Correspondingly, their effects on the system performance are widely visible. A new distributed, online, test solution that addresses stuck-at and open faults in NoC channels in view of maintaining system reliability and yield, is presented here. Considering a suitable test scheduling scheme, the test time and associated performance overhead are lowered. The evaluation of the proposed scheme on a 33 mesh NoC details its runtime performance. It is observed that the proposed solution saves up to 125% test time. Further, average packet latency is improved by 31.93% while energy consumption is reduced by 27.88%.