Cooperative built-in self-testing and self-diagnosis of NOC bisynchronous channels

This paper proposes a built-in self-test/self-diagnosis procedure at start-up of an on-chip network (NoC) for bisynchronous communication channels. Concurrent BIST operations are carried out after reset at each switch, thus resulting in scalable test application time with network size. The key principle consists of exploiting the inherent structural redundancy of the NoC architecture in a cooperative way for the effective diagnosis and error detection. At-speed testing of stuck-at faults can be performed in less than 4000 cycles regardless of their size, with an hardware overhead of less than 30%. © 2012 IEEE.