Embedded Test Instrument for Intermittent Resistive Fault Detection at Chip Level and Its Reuse at Board Level

No-fault-founds (NFFs) threaten the dependability of highly dependable systems in avionic and car industries. Moreover, they drastically increase the test and maintenance costs. One of the main causes of NFFs is intermittent resistive faults (IRFs). IRFs mostly occur due to unstable and marginal interconnections. This paper proposes a new periodic testing method to detect IRFs in interconnections at the chip and the board level. The proposed method is based on on-chip embedded test instruments (ETIs), which are scalable, fully digital, and With a low hardware cost. As a case study, a network-on-chip (NoC) infrastructure with a mesh topology has been utilised. The implementation of the testing method requires a small chip area and power consumption overheads being 3% and 2.5%, respectively. In this paper, first, IRF detection at the chip level has been investigated using simulation-based fault injections in selected interconnections of the NoC. Then, the effectiveness of the proposed method at the board level has been verified by hardware-based fault injections as well as thermal cycling experiments on actual solder joints. The experimental results demonstrated that the on-chip ETIs can be reused effectively to detect IRFs at the board level.