UC Davis

Post-Silicon validation is a fundamental step in integrated circuits fabrication, and designing the setup is an essential step to the process. The setup requires a lot of design effort, especially under the specification and constraint of a many-core processor, which has a large state space and requires high speed and bandwidth of data communication. In this paper, a custom test station design is proposed for the Kilocore2 many-core processor. It consists of a Linux test station that controls the instruments via GPIB, and communicates with an FPGA via UART and PCIe that act as the test driver and monitor for the DUT. Tests are performed using this setup and the results are presented. This setup shall establish the foundation for future validation efforts of the Kilocore2 chip.