Accessing on-chip temperature health monitors using the IEEE 1687 standard

The IEEE 1687 (IJTAG) is a newly IEEE approved standard to access embedded instruments. The usage of these embedded instruments (health monitors) is increasing in order to perform different online measurements for testing purposes as dependability is becoming a key concern in today's electronics. Aging and intermittent resistive faults (IRF) are two threats to a highly dependable system, and temperature can accelerate these two phenomena. In this paper, the work carried out for enabling online IJTAG control, observation and reconfiguration of the health monitors will be discussed. Three temperature monitors along with an IJTAG controller are used to demonstrate online temperature measurements using an IJTAG network interface. The simulation results show that the proposed (on-chip) methodology can reduce the dependency on the PC while observing the (static) embedded instruments in the field.