Analysis of the test data volume reduction benefit of modular SOC testing

Abstract

Modular SOC testing offers numerous benefits that include test power reduction, ease of timing closure, and test re-use among many others. While all these benefits have been emphasized by researchers, the test time and data volume comparisons has been mostly constrained within the context of modular SOC testing only, by comparing the impact of various different modular SOC testing techniques to each other. In this paper, we provide a theoretical test data volume analysis that compares the monolithic test of a flattened design with the same design tested in a modular manner; we present numerous experiments that gauge the magnitude of this benefit. We show that the test data volume reduction delivered by modular SOC testing directly hinges on the test pattern count variation across different modules, and that this reduction can exceed 99% in the SOC benchmarks that we have experimented with.