The Transactions of the Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers D (대한전기학회논문지:시스템및제어부문D)

The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers (대한전기학회)
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Test Time Reduction for BIST by Parallel Divide-and-Conquer Method

분할 및 병렬 처리 방법에 의한 BIST의 테스트 시간 감소

  • Published : 2000.06.01
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Abstract

BIST(Built-in Self Test) has been considered as the most promising DFT(design-for-test) scheme for the present and future test strategy. The most serious problem in applying BIST(Built-in Self Test) into a large circuit is the excessive increase in test time. This paper is focused on this problem. We proposed a new BIST construction scheme which uses a parallel divide-and-conquer method. The circuit division is performed with respect to some internal nodes called test points. The test points are selected by considering the nodal connectivity of the circuit rather than the testability of each node. The test patterns are generated by only one linear feedback shift register(LFSR) and they are shared by all the divided circuits. Thus, the test for each divided circuit is performed in parallel. Test responses are collected from the test point as well as the primary outputs. Even though the divide-and-conquer scheme is used and test patterns are generated in one LFSR, the proposed scheme does not lose its pseudo-exhaustive property. We proposed a selection procedure to find the test points and it was implemented with C/C++ language. Several example circuits were applied to this procedure and the results showed that test time was reduced upto 1/2151 but the increase in the hardware overhead or the delay increase was not much high. Because the proposed scheme showed a tendency that the increasing rates in hardware overhead and delay overhead were less than that in test time reduction as the size of circuit increases, it is expected to be used efficiently for large circuits as VLSI and ULSI.

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