A Novel Hybrid Test Architecture for Router Testing of 2D-Mesh NoC

Network-on-Chip (NoC) architecture has been proposed to solve the global communication problem of complex Systems-on-Chips (SoCs). However, NoC testing is a main challenging problem yet. In this article, we propose novel test architecture for NoC router testing. The proposed hybrid test architecture uses both advantages of Software Based Self-Testing (SBST) and Built in Self-Testing (BIST) methodologies. In this methodology, we propose custom test instructions with regarding the ISA of NoC processors. These custom instructions are responsible for applying test patterns and collecting their responses. In the proposed approach, the processor cores are used to manage the whole test operation of their corresponding router. So there is no need for expensive Automated Test Equipment (ATE) to access internal circuit of NoC₂ while bringing an efficient at-speed testing paradigm and also No need to packet transmission between NoC nodes to test the communication blocks or router. As a case study the Heracles architecture is used and the experimental results show that the proposed test architecture obtains 74% percentage decreases in test time and 4% percentage increases in fault coverage with only 5.2% hardware overhead.