A New Fault Injection Approach for Testing Network-on-Chips

Packet-based on-chip interconnection networks, or Network-on-Chips (NoCs) are progressively replacing global on-chip interconnections in Multi-processor System-on-Chips (MP-SoCs) thanks to better performances and lower power consumption. However, modern generations of MP-SoCs have an increasing sensitivity to faults due to the progressive shrinking technology. Consequently, in order to evaluate the fault sensitivity in NoC architectures, there is the need of accurate test solution which allows to evaluate the fault tolerance capability of NoCs. This paper presents an innovative test architecture based on a dual-processor system which is able to extensively test mesh based NoCs. The proposed solution improves previously developed methods since it is based on a NoC physical implementation which allows to investigate the effects induced by several kind of faults thanks to the execution of on-line fault injection within all the network interface and router resources during NoC run-time operations. The solution has been physically implemented on an FPGA platform using a NoC emulation model adopting standard communication protocols. The obtained results demonstrated the effectiveness of the developed solution in term of testability and diagnostic capabilities and make our solutions suitable for testing large scale NoC design.