Online software-based self-testing in the dark silicon era

• Aggressive technology scaling and intensive computations have caused acceleration in the aging and wear-out process of digital systems, hence leading to an increased occurrence of premature permanent faults. Online testing techniques are becoming a necessity in current and near future digital systems. However, state-of-the-art techniques are not aware of the other digital systems’ power/performance requirements that exist in modern multi-/many-core systems. This chapter presents an approach for power-aware non-intrusive online testing in many-core systems. The approach aims at scheduling at runtime Software-Based Self-Test (SBST) routines on the various cores to exploit their idle periods in order to benefit the potentially available power budget and minimize the performance degradation. Furthermore, a criticality metric is used to identify and rank cores that need testing at a time and power and reliability issues related to the testing at different voltage and frequency levels are taken into account. Experimental results show that the proposed approach can (1) efficiently perform cores’ testing, within less than 1?% penalty on system throughput and by dedicating only 2?% of the actual consumed power, (2) adapt to the current stress level of the cores by using the utilization metric, and (3) cover all the voltage and frequency levels during the various tests.

Subject headings

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Elektroteknik och elektronik -- Annan elektroteknik och elektronik (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering -- Other Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering (hsv//eng)

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