Dependable on-chip infrastructure for dependable MPSOCs

Abstract

Today's MPSOCs employ complex on-chip infrastructure and instrumentation for efficient test, debug, diagnosis, and post-silicon validation, reliability management and maintenance in the field, or monitoring and calibration during operation. To enable flexible and efficient access to such instrumentation, reconfigurable scan networks (RSNs) as recently standardized by IEEE Std 1687 can be used. Given the importance of infrastructure for the dependability of the whole MPSOC, however, the RSN itself must be highly dependable. This paper addresses dependability issues of RSNs including verification, test, and security, and their importance for dependable MPSOCs. First research results are summarized, and open questions for future work are highlighted.