An On-Chip IEEE 1687 Network Controller for Reliability and Functional Safety Management of System-on-Chips

The IEEE 1687 standard defines a standardized mechanism for the off-chip access of embedded instruments. A subset of these instruments are also used for maintaining the reliability and functional safety of the chip during its lifetime. For example, temperature sensors, voltage monitors and Built-In-Self-Test engines. In this paper, we present a novel on-chip controller for IEEE 1687 networks which can execute instrument procedures documented in the IEEE 1687 PDL language. These procedures are incorporated within the reliability and functional safety embedded software that uses the measurements data of the instruments. The controller includes an efficient structural model of the IEEE 1687 network and can perform on-chip pattern retargeting on arbitrary networks. In addition, it can perform localization of instrument interrupts that are propagated via multi-mode IEEE 1687 networks.