An effective solution to thermal-aware test scheduling on network-on-chip using multiple clock rates

Abstract

As more cores are being packed on a single chip, bus-based communication is suffering from bandwidth and scalability issues. As a result, the new approach is to use a network-on-chip (NoC) as the main communication platform on a SoC. NoC provides the flexibility and scalability much needed in the era of multi-cores. NoC-based systems also provide the capability of multiple clocking that is widely used in many SoC nowadays. In this paper, a simulated annealing algorithm for thermal and power-aware test scheduling of cores in a NoC-based SoC using multiple clock rates is presented. Results on different benchmarks show the effectiveness of our technique.