Thermal-aware test scheduling using network-on-chip under multiple clock rates

The increasing trend in the number of cores on a single chip has led to scalability and bandwidth issues in bus-based communication. Network-on-chip (NoC) techniques have emerged as a solution that provides a much needed flexibility and scalability in the era of multi-cores. This article presents an optimal integer linear programming (ILP) formulation and a simulated annealing (SA) solution to thermal and power-aware test scheduling of cores in an NoC-based SoC using multiple clock rates. The methods have been implemented and results on various benchmarks are presented.