On-line detection and diagnosis of stuck-at faults in channels of NoC-based systems

This paper presents a distributed on-line test mechanism that detects stuck-at faults (SAFs) in the channels as well as identifies the faulty channel-wires in an on-chip network (NoC). The proposed test mechanism improves yield and reliability of NoCs at the cost of few test clocks and small performance degradation. Additionally, the mechanism is scalable to large-scale NoCs. We study the impact of channel stuck-at faults on various performance metrics and simulation results establish 100% coverage metrics and the effectiveness of the proposed test mechanism.