On the development of diagnostic test programs for VLIW processors

Software-Based Self-Test (SBST) approaches have shown to be an effective solution to detect permanent faults, both at the end of the production process, and during the operational phase. When partial reconfiguration is adopted to deal with permanent faults, we also need to identify the faulty module, which is then substituted with a spare one. Software-based Diagnosis techniques can be exploited for this purpose, too. When Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) processors are addressed, these techniques can effectively exploit the parallelism intrinsic in these architectures. In this paper we propose a new approach that starting from existing detection-oriented programs generates a diagnosis-oriented test program which in most cases is able to identify the faulty module. Experimental results gathered on a case study show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.