Integrating BIST techniques for on-line SoC testing
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Integrating BIST techniques for on-line SoC testing A. Manzone Centro Ricerche Fiat Torino, Italy alberto.manzone@crf.it
P. Bernardi, M. Grosso, M. Rebaudengo, E. Sanchez, M. Sonza Reorda Politecnico di Torino Torino, Italy {paolo.bernardi, michelangelo.grosso, maurizio.rebaudengo,edgar.sanchez, matteo.sonzareorda}@polito.it
Abstract* Today’s complex system-on-chip integrated circuits include a wide variety of functional IPs whose correct manufacturing must be guaranteed by IC producers. Infrastructure IPs are increasingly often inserted to achieve this purpose; such blocks, explicitly designed for test, are coupled with functional IPs both to obtain yield improvement during the manufacturing process and to perform volume production test. In some fields (e.g., the automotive one) there is a strong need for flexible and reusable test architectures able to guarantee effective and low-cost solutions for mission-mode fault detection capabilities within complex SoCs. In this paper, we propose to reuse structures inserted to support the manufacturing test to perform non-concurrent on-line test of SoCs. The feasibility of this approach and its costs have been evaluated on a real case of study including processor, memory and user defined logic cores.
1. Introduction Today, the possibility to include several functional modules into the same piece of silicon is a great opportunity for designers. Resorting to small area and achieving low power constraints, even more complex systems-on-chips (SoCs) are manufactured by semiconductor industries for a widespread application scenario. However, the susceptibility of these highly integrated components to static and dynamic faults is dramatically rising due to the continuous reduction of transistor size and the growing number of metalization levels in multilayer circuits, in addition to the very high frequency requirements. Testing SoCs is a well-known problem that involves both the accessibility to each single core and the test application frequency. The effort of test engineers usually concentrates on the definition of test
* Contact author: Paolo Bernardi, Dip.
Automatica e Informatica, Politecnico di Torino, C.so Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129, Torino, Italy, Tel: +390115647048, Fax: +390115647099, Email: paolo.bernardi@polito.it
techniques and structures; this allows the test of components, even deeply embedded, resorting to special dedicated circuitries that autonomously apply stimuli at the nominal speed of the device under test. A special family of IP blocks, called Infrastructure IP blocks [1], has been recently proposed to minimize the impact of test over SoC performance. These blocks, included in the SoC in addition to Functional IP cores (F-IPs), aim to ensure the manufacturability of the SOC and to achieve adequate levels of yield and reliability [2]. On-chip Infrastructure IPs are increasingly becoming a viable solution for many IC design issues. Yield and test concerns for very deep-submicron semiconductor technologies have forced chip designers to incorporate Infrastructure IPs into their designs to help with silicon debug, to improve test quality, and to increase manufacturing yield. Examples of application of such Infrastructure IPs include Built-In Self-Test (BIST) for logic and memories, Built-In Self-Repair (BISR) for embedded memories [3], process monitoring [4], and embedded timing [5] analysis circuitry. Even more, Infrastructure IPs can be easily reused in different designs. This reuse minimizes the time IC designers spend manually designing strategies; moreover, design automation has facilitated the use of I-IPs, which significantly reduce the efforts required for a project. Infrastructure IPs are also used to improve in-field reliability that couples with higher performance demand for digital applications. Robustness IPs aim at this scope as they address information integrity, system availability and security. In [6], [7] and [8] solutions implementing detection, analysis and correction of soft errors are given by means of information encoding, behaviour prediction and redundancy. In environments where errors could be very damaging, resulting in system crashes or critical information corruption, the employment of such structures is mandatory. On the contrary, other systems may not require to be continuously monitored and their correct behaviour may be checked only at particular functional phases such as the startup, the shut down or during long idle periods. This is the case of the automotive field: the complexity reached by the electronic components used in the vehicle and the criticality of such environments mandate to guarantee the system integrity. On the other