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A critical concern for post-silicon debug is the need to control the chip at clock cycle level. In a single clock chip, run-stop control can be implemented by gating the clock signal using a stop signal. However, data invalidation might occur when it comes to multiple-clock chips. In this paper, we analyze the possible data invalidation, including data repetition and data loss, when stopping and resuming...
Supply voltage fluctuation caused by inductive noises has become a critical problem in microprocessor design. A voltage emergency occurs when supply voltage variation exceeds the acceptable voltage margin, jeopardizing the microprocessor reliability. Existing techniques assume all voltage emergencies would definitely lead to incorrect program execution and prudently activate rollbacks or flushes to...
Large scale Chip-Multiprocessors (CMPs) generally employ Network-on-Chip (NoC) to connect the last level cache (LLC), which is generally organized as distributed NUCA (non-uniform cache access) arrays for scalability and efficiency. On the other hand, aggressive technology scaling induces severe reliability problems, causing on-chip components (e.g., cores, cache banks, routers) failure due to manufacture...
In this paper, an automatic test instruction generation (ATIG) technique using expanded instructions is presented for software-based self-testing (SBST) of processors. First, mappings between expanded instructions and signals are obtained through data mining, and they are used to impose value ranges of expanded instructions on component signals and generate instruction-level constraints. Second, virtual...
With the advancement of CMOS manufacturing process to nano-scale, future shipped microprocessors will be increasingly vulnerable to intermittent faults. Quantitatively characterizing the vulnerability of microprocessor structures to intermittent faults at early design stage is significantly helpful to balance system performance and reliability. Prior researches have proposed several metrics to characterize...
In order to combine the power of simulation-based and formal techniques, semi-formal methods have been widely explored. Among these methods, abstraction-guided simulation is a quite promising one. In this paper, we propose an abstraction-guided simulation approach aiming to cover hard-to-reach states in functional verification of microprocessors. A Markov model is constructed utilizing the high level...
Soft Errors have emerged as a key challenge to microprocessor design. Traditional soft error tolerance techniques (such as redundant multithreading and instruction duplication) can achieve high fault coverage but at the cost of significant performance degradation. Prior research reports that soft errors can be masked at the architecture level, and the degree of such masking, named as architecture...
Homogeneous manycore processors are emerging for tera-scale computation. Effective defect tolerance techniques are essential to improve the yield of such complex integrated circuits. In this paper, we propose to achieve fault tolerance by employing redundancy at the core-level instead of at the microarchitecture-level. When faulty cores existing on-chip in this architecture, how to reconfigure the...
This paper describes a low cost, high quality at-speed testing strategy implemented on a gigahertz microprocessor with multi-clock domains. The presented DFT method not only utilizes the internal phase-locked loops (PLLs) to provide complex test clock sequences, but also applies a hybrid scan compression structure to reduce test data volume. It is difficult and time-consuming to generate at-speed...
This paper presents the item-missing error model. It stems from the analysis of real bugs that are collected in two market-oriented projects: (1) the AMBA interface of a general-purpose microprocessor IP core; (2) a wireless sensor network oriented embedded processor. The bugs are analyzed via code structure comparison, and it is found that item-missing errors merit attention. The test generation...
This paper describes the design-for-testability (DFT) features and test challenges in a general purpose microprocessor design. An optimized DFT architecture with its implementation strategies are presented in detail. Major DFT solutions are implemented which can meet high-volume manufacturing (HVM) and high quality test goals.
An embedded test stimulus decompressor is presented to generate the test patterns, which can reduce the required vector memory and channels of automatic test equipment (ATE). The decompressor consists of a periodically alterable MUX network which has multiple configurations to decode the input information flexibly. A complete synthesis flow is presented to generate the MUXs network automatically....
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