IEEE P1500 Research Articles

Guest Editors' Introduction: Special Section on Design and Test of Systems-on-Chip (SoC)

IT is with great pleasure that we introduce the special section on Design and Test of Systems-on-Chips (SoC) to the readership of the IEEE Transactions on Computers. This special section consists of eight papers that have been selected to cover a wide spectrum of techniques and applications which are encountered in the design, manufacturing, assembly, and test of today’s SoC. These papers are authored by outstanding researchers and cover experimental and speculative topics. As with all special sections, these topics are only representative of the publically available literature currently provided by the technical community. Systems-on-a-Chip (SoC) represent a rapidly growing and promising field in the electronic and computer industry. Such tremendous growth is the result of significant advances in microelectronic technology that make it possible to build on the same silicon substrate complex systems, including electronic (analog, digital, and mixed mode), mechanical, optical, RF, and microwave cores, as well as sensors, actuators, and software-based systems. As a result, SoCs are very complex hardware/software systems, offering high-performance features. Examples of possible applications include wireless systems, real-time control systems, space exploration systems, and others. SoCs offer the inherent advantages in which computers and their digital domain can be merged to a variety of technologies and applications which, in the past, were attained at boardlevel. The design and test of such complex systems, however, still constitutes a major challenge. From a design point of view, the ability to have a correctly functioning SOC depends on the ability to design and analyze a mixed-technology and to properly account for the interactions among the various cores. Proper management of interfaces between diverse cores and synchronization are examples of the problems to be faced. The unavailability of proper design and simulation tools for such complex systems and the limited resources for different technologies (such as mixed-signal systems) make such an effort rather difficult. The relation between the different modules of an SoC must be properly established using advanced techniques whose technological basis is just emerging. It is expected that these techniques will be highly inter and intradisciplinary in nature, thus involving designers with different backgrounds. Configurability and programmability of the cores in an SoC suggest that wide applicability of these systems is indeed possible with great flexibility in integration. A further issue that designers are confronting is the evaluation of different configurations associated with the high density integration of cores. The merging of different technologies (such as digital and analog) on a single chip is also of high speculative interest because the manufacturing and organization of these systems is in its infancy. These new features must be evaluated at the early design stages because they have a considerable effect on the performance of SoCs as well as their viability for cost-effective implementation. From a testing point of view, the development of proper test access mechanisms is one of the major challenges to be faced in the near future, as indicated also by the 1999 International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors. The test access mechanisms must be compatible with the IEEE P1500 standard, which was developed for embedded core testing and which leaves the problem of the Test Access Mechanism (TAM) design to the system integrator. Several test access mechanisms have been proposed, including dedicated test bus, multiplexed access, etc., but the goal is to find a solution allowing the best trade-off between the test quality and cost (including the testing time). To evaluate test quality, however, complex failure mechanisms which might occur in such complex systems should also be evaluated. As an example, the possible occurrence of undesired coupling, noise, and skews between clock signals of diverse cores are some of the simplest failures which may affect the operation of the interfaces among the cores. Proper models, fault simulation tools, and test quality figures are needed. Testing time should also be reduced. In fact, while the design and test of SoCs requires a long time (similar to any computer system), the time-to-market of an SoC should be kept as short as possible to meet today’s consumers’ changing requirements. The high performance possibly offered by the integration of complex systems on the same chip makes SoCs very promising for real-time applications, like control systems for automotive, avionic, space, chemical plants, etc. As an example, the first prototypes of SOCs, including electronic and mechanical cores, have already been employed by NASA for space exploration missions. Such a promising application potential, however, poses the problem of reliable design and verification as well as correct design and test. In the past, fault tolerance has been generally adopted to electronic systems for many critical mission applications. The possible adoption of fault tolerance techniques for SoCs (to include not only electronics, digital IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMPUTERS, VOL. 55, NO. 2, FEBRUARY 2006 97

Design of reconfigurable access wrappers for embedded core based SoC test

Testing of embedded core based system-on-chip (SoC) ICs is a well known problem, and the upcoming IEEE P1500 Standard on Embedded Core Test (SECT) standard proposes DFT solutions to alleviate it. One of the proposals is to provide every core in the SoC with test access wrappers. Previous approaches to the problem of wrapper design have proposed static core wrappers, which are designed for a fixed test access mechanism (TAM) width. We present the first report of a design of reconfigurable core wrappers which allow for a dynamic change in the width of the TAM executing the core test. Analysis of the corresponding scheduling problem indicates that good approximate schedules can be achieved without significant computational effort. Specifically, we derive a O(N/sub C//sup 2/B) time algorithm which can compute near optimal SoC test schedules, where N/sub C/ is the number of cores and B is the number of top level TAMs. Experimental results on benchmark SoCs are presented which improve upon integer programming based methods, not only in the quality of the schedule, but also significantly reduce the computation time.

ETM10 incorporates hardware segment of IEEE P1500

Engineers at ARM have used the ETM10 to incorporate the hardware segment of the IEEE P1500 standard. The experiment's first phase incorporated the wrapper boundary register, wrapper bypass register, wrapper instruction register, and some standard instructions.

On IEEE P1500's Standard for Embedded Core Test

The increased usage of embedded pre-designed reusable cores necessitates a core-based test strategy, in which cores are tested as separate entities. IEEE P1500 Standard for Embedded Core Test (SECT) is a standard-under-development that aims at improving ease of reuse and facilitating interoperability with respect to the test of core-based system chips, especially if they contain cores from different sources. This paper briefly describes IEEE P1500, and illustrates through a simplified example its scalable wrapper architecture, its test information transfer model described in a standardized Core Test Language, and its two compliance levels. The standard is still under development, and this paper only reflects the view of six active participants of the standardization committee on its current status.

CAS-BUS: A Test Access Mechanism and a Toolbox Environment for Core-Based System Chip Testing

As System on a Chip (SoC) testing faces new challenges, some new test architectures must be developed. This paper describes a Test Access Mechanism (TAM) named CAS-BUS that solves some of the new problems the test industry has to deal with. This TAM is scalable, flexible and dynamically reconfigurable. The CAS-BUS architecture is compatible with the IEEE P1500 standard proposal in its current state of development, and is controlled by Boundary Scan features. This basic CAS-BUS architecture has been extended with two independent variants. The first extension has been designed in order to manage SoC made up with both wrapped cores and non wrapped cores with Boundray Scan features. The second deals with a test pin expansion method in order to solve the I/O bandwidth problem. The proposed solution is based on a new compression/decompression mechanism which provides significant results in case of non correlated test patterns processing. This solution avoids TAM performance degradation. These test architectures are based on the CAS-BUS TAM and allow trade-offs to optimize both test time and area overhead. A tool-box environment is provided, in order to automatically generate the needed component to build the chosen SoC test architecture.