Test response reuse-based SoC core test compression and test scheduling for test application time minimization

This paper presents a novel approach to system-on-a-chip (SoC) core test compression and test scheduling. Every test set is compressed through the test responses of its preceding core in preprocessing step by simulation. Consequently, under our method the test sets contain two parts: (1) the test sets that are compatible with the test responses of their individual preceding cores. This part can be removed from their original test sets, and (2) the test sets that none of the test vectors from them are compatible with the test responses of their individual preceding cores. On hardware implementation, only a couple of 2-1 MUXs are needed. The algorithms for reordering the sequences of core-under-tests and those of the test vectors for each corresponding core are outlined for optimal test compression results. It needs neither coder nor decoder, thus saving hardware overhead. Power-constrained SoC core test pipelining consumes less test application time. Hierarchical clustering-based SoC test scheduling can be implemented easily, and the hardware overhead is negligible. Experimental results on benchmark ISCAS 89 demonstrate that our method achieves significant improvement of test time and less ATE requirement over the previous methods, and it does not discount the fault coverage of each test set, moreover, the fault coverage for some test sets is improved instead.