Test scheduling with bandwidth division multiplexed for network-on-chip using refined quantum-inspired evolutionary algorithm

摘要

Efficiently using the limited I/O resources provided by automatic test equipment (ATE) to test Network-on-Chip (NoC) is a key issue in NoC test scheduling. Numerous test scheduling approaches for NoC have been proposed to test the embedded cores. Yet, these approaches commonly assumed that a whole test access mechanism (TAM) is occupied by an embedded core during testing. Different from these existing approaches, in this paper, we propose an approach for efficiently utilizing the TAM resources for test scheduling in NoC. We make use of the bandwidth division multiplexed (BDM) strategy, which divides a single TAM into several sub-TAMs with different width, enables multiple embedded cores share the same TAM to achieve transmission at the same time, thus maximize the test parallelism. Then, a refined quantum-inspired evolutionary algorithm (RQEA) strategy, which incorporates multi-nary and variable population techniques, is presented to solve the test scheduling problem of NoC. In addition, path delays, path conflicts and power constraints were taken into consideration. Experimental results for the ITC'02 SoC test benchmarks show that the new approach results in substantial reduction in overall test time for a limited TAM budget, compared to previous works.