MTNet: Design of a wireless test framework for heterogeneous nanometer systems-on-chip

The rapid migration to nanometer design processes has brought an unprecedented level of integration by allowing system designers to pack a wide variety of functionalities on-chip, namely, systems-on-a-chip (SoCs). In the meantime, electronic testing becomes an enabling technology for this SoC paradigm, since the integration of various core tests is a big challenge, and has revealed a widening gap between design and manufacturing. In particular, the increasing complexity and density of nanometer SoCs have led to the problem of visibility and accessibility in testing. In this paper, we propose an integrated wireless test framework to resolve the acerbated core accessibility problem and to eliminate the incompatibility between the existing SoC test strategies and the next generation billion-transistor SoC specification. Under such a test strategy, the intra-chip wireless links form the wireless test access mechanism (TAM) to transport test data chip-wide. We present a self-configurable multi-hop wireless test micronetwork, dubbed MTNet, with simple and efficient data transmission protocols, and develop a system level design-for-testability structure. Consequently, we propose a geographic routing algorithm to find the test access paths for the deeply embedded cores and a path driven test scheduling algorithm to design and integrate the MTNet-based SoC test access architecture. Extensive simulation study show the feasibility and applicability of MTNet.