Accessing on-chip temperature health monitors using the IEEE 1687 standard

The IEEE 1687 (IJTAG) is a newly IEEE approved standard to access embedded instruments. The usage of these embedded instruments (health monitors) is increasing in order to perform different online measurements for testing purposes as dependability is becoming a key concern in today’s electronics. Aging and intermittent resistive faults (IRF) are two threats to a highly dependable system, and temperature can accelerate these two phenomena. In this paper, the work carried out for enabling online IJTAG control, observation and reconfiguration of the health monitors will be discussed. Three temperature monitors along with an IJTAG controller are used to demonstrate online temperature measurements using an IJTAG network interface. The simulation results show that the proposed (on-chip)methodology can reduce the dependency on the PC while observing the (static) embedded instruments in the field

A cost-efficient dependability management framework for self-aware system-on-chips based on IEEE 1687

A cost-efficient framework for executing life-time dependability procedures is presented in this paper. The proposed framework relies on distributed sensors and actuators (embedded instruments) for self-awareness and adaptation, where the IEEE 1687 standard (iJTAG) is utilized for the dependability communications and the on-chip access of the instruments

Intermittent resistive faults in digital cmos circuits

A major threat in extremely dependable high-end process node integrated systems in e.g. Avionics are no failures found (NFF). One category of NFFs is the intermittent resistive fault, often originating from bad (e.g. Via or TSV-based) interconnections. This paper will show the impact of these faults on the behavior of a digital CMOS circuit via simulation. As the occurrence rate of this kind of defects can take e.g. One month, while the duration of the defect can be as short as 50 nanoseconds, to evoke and detect these faults is a huge scientific challenge. An on-chip data logging system with time stamp and stored environmental conditions, along with the detection, will drastically improve the task of maintenance of avionics and reduce the current high debugging costs