Online Periodic Test Mechanism for Homogeneous Many-core Processors

A possible solution to the reliability challenges of new fabrication technologies is self-test and self-reconfiguration with no or limited external control. This necessitates the inclusion of mechanisms for detection, recovery and reconfiguration, providing the chip with self-healing capability. While appropriate mechanisms for system recovery and reconfiguration exist, detection remains to be a challenge in realization of self-healing and graceful degradable many-core processors. In this paper we propose a scalable test architecture to distribute test stimuli among homogeneous processing cores in a many-core processor. We have incorporated test infrastructure in the architecture that periodically suspends normal operation of processing cores and applies test to them. This procedure is performed in an online fashion without any downtime visible to the end user. Our proposed fault detection mechanism can be accompanied with appropriate recovery and reconfiguration techniques in order to realize a many-core processor with self-healing capability.