On Covering Structural Defects in NoCs by Functional Tests

Structural tests provide high defect coverage by considering the low-level circuit details. Functional test provides a faster test with reduced test patterns and does not imply additional hardware overhead. However, it lacks a quantitative measure of structural fault coverage. This paper fills this gap by presenting a satisfiability based method to generate functional test patterns while considering structural faults. The method targets NoC switches and links, and it is independent of the switch structure and the network topology. It can be applied for any structural fault type as it relies on a generalized structural fault model.