An optimal formulation for test scheduling network-on-chip using multiple clock rates

Abstract

With the growing trend of increasing number of cores 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 system 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, an optimal integer linear programming (ILP) solution for test scheduling of cores in a NoC-based SoC using multiple clock rates is presented. Results on different benchmarks show the effectiveness of our techniques.