A Contention-Free Test Scheduling Method Based on Path-Tree in NoC

In using on-chip network infrastructure as test access mechanism to test the embedded cores of NoC, it’s easy to lead to the confliction of resources if there are multiple I/O ports. This paper proposes a contention-free method to solve the resource confliction problem in parallel testing for NoC. After dividing the network into multiple partitions, a path tree is builded for every border node to find a connected path and then allocate links of the path to each partition. The ultimate goal of this paper is to make all partitions connected, thus removing the resource confliction, reducing the testing time and guaranteeing the reliability for the whole chip. Experimental results show that, the testing time can be reduced by 14.13%~52.62% when compared with general cases, and can be reduced by 16.42% at most while compared with the existing algorithm. Therefore, the proposed method is a relatively optimal contention-free test scheduling method.