Reusing NoC-infrastructure for test data compression

Abstract

Previous work on testing NoC-based systems has shown that the integrated network can be efficiently reused as test access mechanism (TAM). These approaches exploit the given infrastructure for data transportation. Beyond that, NoC-architectures for nanoscale systems also have to ensure a reliable communication by additional hardware and/or software measures. For example a cyclic redundancy check (CRC) may be added to protect the end-to-end communication between network resources. This paper presents an approach to reuse the CRC hardware for a compression scheme similar to LFSR-reseeding. The experimental results show that competitive compression ratios can be achieved at low extra cost. This way, core testing in NoC-based systems can benefit from test data compression even for standard cores without integrated decompressors.