A dynamic programming solution for optimizing test delivery in multicore SOCs

Abstract

We present a test-data delivery optimization algorithm for system-on-chip (SOC) designs with hundreds of cores, where a network-on-chip (NOC) is used as the interconnection fabric. The proposed algorithm is the first to co-optimize the number of access points, access-point locations, pin distribution to access points, and assignment of cores to access points for optimal test resource utilization. Test-time minimization for grid-based NOCs is modeled as an NOC partitioning problem and solved with dynamic programming in polynomial time. The proposed method yields high-quality results that are comparable to integer linear programming (ILP), but unlike ILP, it is scalable to large SOCs with many cores. We present results on synthetic NOC-based SOCs constructed using cores from the ITC'02 benchmark, and demonstrate the scalability of our approach for two SOCs of the future, one with nearly 1,000 cores and the other with 1,600 cores.