Detecting and diagnosing open faults in NoC channels on activation of diagonal nodes

In an on-chip network (NoC), the channels often experience several open faults because of certain manufacturing or in-field defects. Such faults may cause enormous loss of packets degrading the reliability and performance of the system. A reliability-aware NoC should include a module that has the capability of detecting and locating an open fault in the channels so as to enable alternative routing paths and to prevent excessive packet loss. This paper proposes an on-line test scheme that detects open faults and locates the faulty channel-wires in an NoC. The proposed scheme makes use of diagonal-driven test strategy and scales well when the size of the NoC increases. We evaluate the performance of an NoC under large-traffic scenario and our simulation results establish the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in terms of several network-metrics.