Test scheduling with thermal optimization for network-on-chip systems using variable-rate on-chip clocking

Chip overheating has become a critical problem during test of today’s complex core-based systems. In this paper, we ad-dress the overheating problem in Network-on-Chip (NoC) sys-tems through thermal optimization using variable-rate on-chip clocking. We control the core temperatures during test schedul-ing by assigning different test clock frequencies to cores. We present two heuristics to achieve thermal optimization and re-duced test time. Experimental results for example NoC systems show that the proposed method can guarantee thermal safety and yield better thermal balance, compared to previous meth-ods using power constraints. Test application time is also re-duced.