link: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9765656

Runtime Testability on Autonomous System

Lok-Won Kim , Quang Hieu Vo , and Choong Seon Hong , Senior Member, IEEE

Abstract—More than ever, autonomous systems that are critical to everyday life, social infrastructure, and social security are increasingly dependent on sophisticated hardware computer systems. As the computer hardware systems become increasingly complex and semiconductor manufacturing technology becomes continuously miniaturized (especially in several nanometer technologies), there is a corresponding increased vulnerability to system malfunction caused by runtime hardware defects. Detecting defects that will be generated in postdeployment time is impossible in the predeployment verification. This is the reason why some lifetime testabilities are necessary, especially for autonomous systems requiring extremely high-reliable functionalities. This article proposes a hardware architecture that extends the pre-deployment mass production verification (such as the scan-test) to the lifetime of the hardware systems, to guarantee the mass production verification level integrity for the hardware systems in their lifetime. In addition, this article explains how to recover hardware functionalities compromised by runtime defects.
Index Terms—Autonomous system, design for testability, online test, runtime testability, system on chip.