Best Paper Award at International Symposium on Networks-on-Chip 2016

A scientific contribution from the Engineering Department:

Gabriele Miorandi, Alberto Celin, Michele Favalli, Davide Bertozzi, "A Built-In Self-Testing Framework for Asynchronous Bundled-Data NoC Switches Resilient to Delay Variations", IEEE/ACM Int. Symp. on Networks-on-Chip, 2016.

has been chosen as the winner of the Best Paper Award at the 2016 IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Networks-on-Chip, which took place in Nara (Japan) from august 31st to september 2nd, 2016 (www.nocsymposium.org).

The awarded paper is the outcome of an interdisciplinary research project led by Davide Bertozzi (from the master program in electrical and telecommunications engineering) and Michele Favalli (from the master program in computer science and automation engineering), both belonging to the Engineering Department.
The design and technical implementation effort has been led and mostly carried out by Gabriele Miorandi, a third-year PhD student with major depth in asynchronous interconnection networks, with the valuablesupport of Alberto Celin, a former master student currently working in the Advanced Engineering Group at DANA Italia.

The paper proposes a novel testing methodology for clockless asynchronous interconnection networks. On the one hand, such networks enable to easily interface on-chip voltage and frequency domains with one another, thus facilitating power management. On the other hand, they suffer from performance and functional non-determinism effects, which causes traditional signature-based diagnostic methods not to be applicable any more.
Researchers of the Engineering Department have proposed a built-in self-testing methodology which performs signature analysis at a finer (packet-level) granularity, thus overcoming the non-determinism concern.