On-Line Periodic Self-Testing of High-Speed Floating-Point Units in Microprocessors

On-line periodic testing of microprocessors is a viable low-cost alternative for a wide variety of embedded systems which cannot afford hardware or software redundancy techniques but necessitate the detection of intermittent or permanent faults. Low-cost, on-line periodic testing has been previously applied to the integer datapaths of microprocessors but not to their high-performance real number processing counterparts consisting of sophisticated high-speed floating-point (FP) units. In this paper, we present, an effective on-line periodic self-testing methodology for high-speed FP units and demonstrate it on high-speed FP adders/subtracters of both single and double precision. The proposed self-test code development methodology leads to compact self-test routines that exploit the integer part of the processors instruction set architecture to apply test sets to the FP subsystem periodically. The periodic self-test routines exhibit very low memory storage requirements along with a very small number of memory references which are both fundamental requirements for on-line periodic testing. A comprehensive set of experiments on both single and double precision FP units including pipelined versions, and on a RISC processor with a complete FP unit demonstrate the efficacy of the methodology in terms of very high fault coverage and low memory footprint thus rendering the proposed methodology highly appropriate for on-line periodic testing.