Incremental Test Pattern Generation for Structurally Similar Circuits
Abstract
The advancement of semiconductor technology has resulted in the development of devices that are fast, cost-effective, low-power, and high-performance. Many gates are integrated into smaller areas, resulting in increased complexity of digital circuits. Increased size and complexity result in a large number of faults, which increases the time taken to test the circuit. However, as the size of the digital designs increases, they also exhibit structural similarities. This thesis describes a test generation process that utilizes structural similarity to speed up the test generation process. The property of structural similarity can be seen in circuits that are subjected to engineering change order (ECO), circuits that are modified during place and route, circuits subjected to retiming, circuits with multiple cores. The goal is to determine the testability of a circuit (circuit2) given a test set for a structurally similar circuit (circuit1). This is achieved by transforming a test set generated for circuit1 into a test set for circuit2 without repeating the entire test generation process. The algorithm starts with a structural analysis of circuit1 and circuit2 that captures their structural properties using an integer-arithmetic based computation called signatures. The signatures are used to obtain a partial mapping between the inputs and outputs of the two circuits. The mapping is used for transforming test patterns for circuit1 into test patterns for circuit2. The first chapter looks into similar circuits obtained after modifying the gate-level netlist. In the next chapter, structurally similar circuits were obtained by modifying the RTL, and the gate-level was resynthesized. This chapter proposed a mapping methodology to accommodate the changes introduced during the resynthesis of a netlist. Lastly, the thesis described a test generation methodology where transition faults are considered, which required two-cycle tests to be detected.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Pomeranz, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Electrical engineering
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