Test economics for homogeneous manycore systems

Homogeneous manycore systems that contain a large number of structurally identical cores are emerging for tera-scale computation. To ensure the required quality and reliability of such complex integrated circuits before supplying them to final users, extensive manufacturing tests need to be conducted and the associated test cost can account for a great share of the total production cost. By introducing spare cores on-chip, the burn-in test time can be shortened and the defect coverage requirements for core tests can be also relaxed, without sacrificing quality of the shipped products. The above test cost reduction is likely to exceed/compensate the manufacturing cost of the extra cores, thus reducing the total production cost of manycore systems. We develop novel analytical models that capture the above tradeoff in this paper and we verify the effectiveness of the proposed test economics model for hypothetical manycore systems with various configurations.