Reusing an on-chip network for the test of core-based systems

Networks-on-chip are likely to become the main communication platform of systems-on-chip. To cope with the growing complexity of the test of such systems, the authors propose the reuse of the on-chip network as a test access mechanism to the cores embedded into systems that use this communication platform. An algorithm exploiting the network characteristics to minimize test time is presented. Then, the reuse strategy is evaluated considering a number of system configurations, such as different positions of the cores in the network, power consumption constraints and number of interfaces with the tester. Experimental results for the ITC'02 SOC Test Benchmarks show that the parallelization capability of the network can be exploited to reduce the system test time, whereas area and pin overhead are strongly minimized.