Instruction-Based Self-Testing of Delay Faults in Pipelined Processors

Abstract

Aggressive processor design methodology using high-speed clock and deep submicrometer technology is necessitating the use of at-speed delay fault testing. Although nearly all modern processors use pipelined architecture, no method has been proposed in literature to model these for the purpose of test generation. This paper proposes a graph theoretic model of pipelined processors and develops a systematic approach to path delay fault testing of such processor cores using the processor instruction set. The proposed methodology generates test vectors under the extracted architectural constraints. These test vectors can be applied in functional mode of operation, hence, self-test becomes possible. Self-test in a functional mode can also be used for online periodic testing. Our approach uses a graph model for architectural constraint extraction and path classification. Test vectors are generated using constrained automatic test pattern generation (ATPG) under the extracted constraints. Finally, a test program consisting of an instruction sequence is generated for the application of generated test vectors. We applied our method to two example processors, namely a 16-bit 5-stage VPRO pipelined processor and a 32-bit pipelined DLX processor, to demonstrate the effectiveness of our methodology