Non-interfering On-line and In-field SoC Testing

TL;DR

This paper presents a non-interfering in-field testing approach for SoCs, enabling detection and recovery from SEUs and aging defects during normal operation without disrupting system functionality.

Contribution

It introduces a novel hardware and software framework combining System Hyper Pipelining and RTL ATPG for comprehensive, non-intrusive in-field testing of SoCs in safety-critical applications.

Findings

Achieved 100% stuck-at-fault coverage with software-based self-tests.

Demonstrated promising performance-per-area and test-cycle metrics.

Enabled ultra-fast recovery from SEU events without interrupting normal operation.

Abstract

With increasing aging problems of advanced technologies, in-field testing becomes an inevitable challenge, on top of the already demanding requirements, such as the ISO26262 for automotive safety. SOCs used in space, automotive or military applications in particular are worst affected as the in-field failures in these applications could even be life threatening. We focus on on-line and in-field testing for Single Event Upsets (SEU, caused by a single ionizing particle) and aging defects (such as delay variation and stuck-at faults) which may appear during normal operation of the device. Interrupting normal operations for aging defects testing is a major challenge for the OS. Additionally, checkpointing with rollback-recovery can be costly and mission critical data can be lost in case of an SEU event. We eliminate many of these problems with our non-interfering in-field testing and recovery solution. We apply a hardware performance improvement technique called System Hyper Pipelining (SHP), which combines well-known context switching (Barrel CPU) and C-slow retiming techniques. The SoC is enhanced with an SEU detection and ultra-fast recovery mechanism. We also use an RTL ATPG framework that enables the generation of software-based self-tests to achieve 100% coverage of all testable stuck-at-faults. The paper finishes with very promising performance-per-area and test-cycles-per-net results. We argue that our robust system architecture and EDA solution, designed and developed primarily for in-field testing of SoCs, can also be used for production and on-line testing as well as other applications.