An On-Chip Test Clock Control Scheme for Circuit Aging Monitoring

Abstract

In highly reliable and durable systems, failures due to aging might result in catastrophes. Aging monitoring techniques to prevent catastrophes by predicting such a failure are required. Aging can be monitored by performing a delay test at faster clocks than functional clock in field and checking the current delay state from the test clock frequencies at which the delay test is passed or failed. In this paper, we focus on test clock control scheme for a system-onchip (SoC) with multiple clock domains. We describe limitations of existing at-speed test clock control methods and present an on-chip faster-than-at-speed test clock control scheme for intra/inter-clock domain test. Experimental results show our simulation results and area analysis. With a simple control scheme, with low area overhead, and without any modification of scan architecture, the proposed method enables faster-than-at-speed test of SoCs with multiple clock domains.