Thermal-Aware Preemptive Test Scheduling for Network-on-Chip Based 3D ICs

The recently proposed three-dimensional (3D) integration promises to enhance the system performance. However, it poses several test challenges. Thermal safety of the 3D system is the foremost concern. Testing of the system plays an important role to improve the yield. This work presents a thermal-aware core test scheduling technique in 3D stacked multicore system using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) strategy. To improve the solution quality, the basic PSO has been augmented with multiple PSO operations. The proposed strategy has been compared with other the techniques available in the literature. Thermal-safety has been achieved by providing nominal sacrifice in the test time. The experimental results project the improvement over other state-of-the-art strategies.