Scan Chain Partitioning Research Articles

On-Chip Self-Test Methodology With All Deterministic Compressed Test Patterns Recorded in Scan Chains

This paper presents a novel test architecture that combines the advantages of high-quality deterministic scan-based test and low-cost built-in self-test. The main idea is to record (store) all required compressed test data in a novel scan chain structure, and extract and decompress them during testing. This requires a very high compression ratio to obtain a low test data volume, that is, smaller than the number of scan cells in the circuit under test. To achieve such a high compression ratio, we propose a novel compression method that combines broadcast scan as well as a tailored single-input compression architecture. We also utilize the concept of scan chain partitioning and clock gating to reduce the test time and test power. An on-chip test controller is employed to automatically generate all required control signals for the whole test procedure. This significantly reduces the requirements on external automatic test equipment. Experimental results show that our method is well suitable for multicore designs. For example, experiments on the 8-core open-source OpenSPARC T2 processor with 5.7M gates show that all required test data for 100% testable stuck-at fault coverage can be stored in just 59.4% of the scan cells of the processor. Experimental results for transition faults are also presented, which show that more identical cores are needed in order to store all test data for transition faults. We also discuss how to extend this paper to address fault diagnosis and engineering change order problems.

Mitigating Observability Loss of Toggle-Based X-Masking via Scan Chain Partitioning

The Toggle-based X -masking method requires a single toggle at a given cycle, there is a chance that non- X values are also masked. Hence, the non- X value over-masking problem may cause a fault coverage degradation. In this paper, a scan chain partitioning scheme is described to alleviate non- X bit over-masking problem arising from Toggle-based X -Masking method. The scan chain partitioning method finds a scan chain combination that gives the least toggling conflicts. The experimental results show that the amount of over-masked bits is significantly reduced, and it is further reduced when the proposed method is incorporated with X -canceling method. However, as the number of scan chain partitions increases, the control data for decoder increases. To reduce a control data overhead, this paper exploits a Huffman coding based data compression. Assuming two partitions, the size of control bits is even smaller than the conventional X -toggling method that uses only one decoder. In addition, selection rules of X -bits delivered to X -Canceling MISR are also proposed. With the selection rules, a significant test time increase can be prevented.

Utilizing Circuit Structure for Scan Chain Diagnosis

Scan chain diagnosis has become a critical issue to yield loss in modern technology. In this paper, we present a scan chain partitioning algorithm and a scan chain reordering algorithm to improve scan chain fault diagnosis resolution. In our scan chain partition algorithm, we take into consideration not only logic dependency but also the controllability between scan flip-flops. After the partition step, the ordering of scan cells is performed to decrease the range of suspect faulty scan cells by a bipartite matching reordering algorithm. The experimental results show that our method can reduce the number of suspect scan cells from 378-31 to at most 3 for most cases of ITC'99 benchmarks.

Low-Power Scan Testing: A Scan Chain Partitioning and Scan Hold Based Technique

Power consumption during scan testing operations can be significantly higher than that expected in the normal functional mode of operation in the field. This may affect the reliability of the circuit under test (CUT) and/or invalidate the testing process increasing yield loss. In this paper, a scan chain partitioning technique and a scan hold mechanism are combined for low power scan operation. Substantial power reductions can be achieved, without any impact on the test application time or the fault coverage and without the need to use scan cell reordering or clock and data gating techniques. Furthermore, the proposed design solution for scan power alleviation, permits the efficient exploitation of X-filling techniques for capture power reduction or the use of extreme (power independent) compression techniques for test data volume reduction.

On the Application of Dynamic Scan Chain Partitioning for Reducing Peak Shift Power

Scan-based testing of integrated circuits results in significant switching activity during the shift operations, dissipating excessive power levels. When such levels are beyond the peak power level under which the chip can functionally operate at, it may lead to an unexpected behavior of the design, resulting in a yield loss. One of the most effective solutions to reduce peak shift power is to partition the scan chains into multiple groups, wherein a single group is active at any time instance within a shift cycle. The partitioning of the chains into groups can be performed statically, i.e., per test set, or dynamically, i.e., per test pattern. In this work, we address the application of dynamic scan chain partitioning for reducing peak shift power. First, we address the application of dynamic partitioning to test delay faults in at-speed test techniques. Then, we formulate the scan chain partitioning problem via Integer Linear Programming (ILP), in order to evenly distribute the transitions produced by any pattern over multiple time instances within the shift cycle, maximally reducing the peak shift power. Finally, we evaluate the power reduction benefit of dynamic partitioning through an extensive set of experiments using different scan configurations and test set characteristics of benchmark circuits as well as industrial designs. The results indicate that dynamic partitioning provides significant reduction to peak shift power over static partitioning methods, and that the benefit is accentuated in scan architectures with fewer scan chains, test sets with more don't care bits, and designs with larger variances of weight differences for transitions in the scan cells.

Dynamic Scan Chain Partitioning for Reducing Peak Shift Power During Test

Scan chain partitioning techniques are quite effective in reducing test power, as the rippling in the clock network, scan chains, and logic is reduced altogether. Partitioning approaches implemented in a static manner may fail to reduce peak power down to the desired level, however, depending on the transition distribution of the problematic pattern in the statically constructed scan chain partitions. In this paper, we propose a dynamic partitioning approach capable of adapting to the transition distribution of any test pattern and, thus, of delivering near-perfect peak power reductions. The proposed dynamic partitioning hardware allows for the partitioning reconfiguration on a per test pattern basis, hence delivering a solution that is test set independent, yet its quality is superior to that of any test set dependent solution.

Power Reduction during Scan Testing Based on Multiple Capture Technique

In this paper, we present a multiple capture approach to reducing the peak power as well as average power consumption during testing. The basic idea behind is to divide a scan chain into two sub-scan chains, and only one sub-scan chain will be enabled at a time during the scan shift or capture operations. We develop a pattern insertion technique to efficiently deal with the capture violation problem during the capture cycle. In order to alleviate the timing cost due to the insertion of redundant patterns, a scan chain partitioning method incorporated with test pattern reordering is developed to reduce the testing time. Experimental results for large ISCAS'89 benchmark circuits show that the proposed approach can efficiently reduce peak and average power with little timing overhead.

Improving test effectiveness of scan-based BIST by scan chain partitioning

Test effectiveness of a test-per-scan built-in self-test (BIST) scheme is highly dependent on the length and number of scan chains. Fewer cycles are used to capture test responses when the length of the scan chains increases and the total number of clock cycles is fixed. Another important feature of the test-per-scan BIST scheme is that test responses of the circuit at the inputs of the scan flip-flops are not observable during the shift cycles. A new scan architecture is proposed to make a scan-based circuit more observable. The scan chain is partitioned into multiple segments. Multiple capture cycles are inserted to receive test responses during the shift cycles compared to the test-per-scan test scheme. Unlike other BIST schemes using multiple capture cycles after the shift cycles, our method inserts multiple capture cycles inside the shift cycles, but not after the shift cycles. Unlike the previous method that drives multiple scan segments by a single scan-in signal, the proposed method uses a new architecture to control all scan segments by different signals. Sufficient experimental results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the method.

Identification of Error-Capturing Scan Cells in Scan-BIST With Applications to System-on-Chip

We present a new partition-based fault-diagnosis technique for identifying error-capturing scan cells in a scan-BIST environment. This approach relies on a two-step scan chain partitioning scheme. In the first step, an interval-based partitioning scheme is used to generate a small number of partitions, where each element of a partition consists of a set of consecutive scan cells. In the second step, additional partitions are created using a previously proposed random-selection partitioning method. Two-step partitioning provides higher diagnostic resolution than previous schemes that rely either on random-selection partitioning or deterministic partitioning. We show via experiments that the proposed method requires only a small amount of additional hardware. The proposed scheme is especially suitable for a system-on-chip (SOC) composed of multiple embedded cores, where test access is provided by means of a TestRail that is threaded through the internal scan chains of the embedded cores. We present analytical results to characterize two-step partitioning, and present experimental results for the six largest ISCAS'89 benchmark circuits and two SOCs crafted from some of the ISCAS'89 circuits.

Scan Architecture With Mutually Exclusive Scan Segment Activation for Shift- and Capture-Power Reduction

Power dissipation during scan testing is becoming an important concern as design sizes and gate densities increase. While several approaches have been recently proposed for reducing power dissipation during the shift cycle (minimum-transition don't care fill, special scan cells, and scan chain partitioning), limited work has been carried out toward reducing the peak power during test response capture and the few existing approaches for reducing capture power rely on complex automatic test pattern generation (ATPG) algorithms. This paper proposes a scan architecture with mutually exclusive scan segment activation which overcomes the shortcomings of previous approaches. The proposed architecture achieves both shift and capture-power reduction with no impact on the performance of the design, and with minimal impact on area and testing time (typically 2%-3%). An algorithmic procedure for assigning flip-flops to scan segments enables reuse of test patterns generated by standard ATPG tools. An implementation of the proposed method had been integrated into an automated design flow using commercial synthesis and simulation tools which was used on a wide range of benchmark designs. Reductions up to 57% in average power, and up to 44% and 34% in peak-power dissipation during shift and capture cycles, respectively, were obtained when using two scan segments. Increasing the number of scan segments to six leads to reductions of 96% and 80% in average power and, respectively, maximum number of simultaneous transitions.