This tutorial presents an overview of the issues related to the test, diagnosis and fault-tolerance of NoC-based systems.  First, the characteristics of the NoC design (topologies, structures, routers, wrappers, and protocols) are presented, as well as a summary of the terms used in the field and an overview of the existing industrial and academic NoCs.  Then, the challenges to test, diagnose and tolerate faults in NoC-based systems are discussed.  Current test strategies are presented: re-use of the network for core testing, test scheduling for the NoC reuse, test access methods and interface, efficient reuse of the network, and power-aware and thermal-aware NoC-based SoC testing.  In addition, the challenges and solutions for the NoC (interconnects, routers, and network interface) test and diagnosis are presented.  Finally, since quality-of-service is one of the main challenges for the NoC use, fault-tolerance techniques for the NoC are discussed.

The intended audience are professionals, students, design and test engineers, and researchers interested in having introductory and intermediate knowledge on recent advances in test, diagnosis and fault-tolerance of integrated systems based on NoCs.

This tutorial is part of the IEEE Computer Society TTTC Test Technology Educational Program (TTEP) 2009