A scalable test strategy for network-on-chip routers

Network-on-chip has recently emerged as alternative communication architecture for complex system chip and different aspects regarding NoC design have been studied in the literature. However, the test of the NoC itself for manufacturing faults has been marginally tackled. This paper proposes a scalable test strategy for the routers in a NoC, based on partial scan and on an IEEE 1500-compliant test wrapper. The proposed test strategy takes advantage of the regular design of the NoC to reduce both test area overhead and test time. Experimental results show that a good tradeoff of area overhead, fault coverage, test data volume, and test time is achieved by the proposed technique. Furthermore, the method can be applied for large NoC sizes and it does not depend on the network routing and control algorithms, which makes the method suitable to test a large class of network models