학술논문

Hierarchical test generation for systems on a chip
Document Type
Conference
Source
VLSI Design 2000. Wireless and Digital Imaging in the Millennium. Proceedings of 13th International Conference on VLSI Design VLSI design 2000 VLSI Design, 2000. Thirteenth International Conference on. :198-203 2000
Subject
Components, Circuits, Devices and Systems
Engineered Materials, Dielectrics and Plasmas
Computing and Processing
System testing
System-on-a-chip
Automatic testing
Hip
Design for testability
Integrated circuit testing
Microprocessors
Jacobian matrices
Automatic test pattern generation
Moore's Law
Language
ISSN
1063-9667
Abstract
The rapid increase in functionality on a single chip in the last few years has increased the gap between the complexity of the design and the capability of commercial test tools. In particular the test needs for systems on a chip (SOC) are not addressed by existing tools. Because some of the cores integrated on a single SOC may not have embedded testability features, it is not always possible to use conventional design for testability (DFT) methodologies directly. This paper presents a novel approach for generating tests for complex SOCs which targets one module (or core) at a time, by extracting its environment elegantly in the form of constraints and storing it as virtual logic. Information about the core processor and internal bus is used to reduce the size of the virtual logic so that a commercial ATPG tool can be used to generate tests. These tests are then automatically translated to system-level tests. The approach is illustrated with an example SOC based on the picoJava core.