Is It Cost-Effective to Achieve Very High Fault Coverage for Testing Homogeneous SoCs with Core-Level Redundancy?

This work argues to reduce the production cost of homogeneous SoCs by introducing dedicated test cost-driven redundant cores. By doing so, the fault coverage for each core and hence the SoC test cost can be dramatically reduced, which is able to compensate the manufacturing cost of the extra cores. A case study is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.