• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.5 no.6
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• pp.515-520
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• 2004

Core-based system-on-a-chip (SoC) designs present a number of test challenges. Two major problems that are becoming increasingly important are long application time during manufacturing test and high volume of test data. Highly efficient compression techniques have been proposed to reduce storage and application time for high volume data by exploiting the repetitive nature of test vectors. This paper proposes a new test data compression technique for SoC testing. In the proposed technique, compression is achieved by partitioning the test vector set and removing repeating segment. This process has $O(n^{-2})$ time complexity for compression with a simple hardware decoding circuitry. It is shown that the efficiency of the proposed compression technique is comparable with sophisticated software compression techniques with the advantage of easy and fast decoding.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.48 no.2
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• pp.44-54
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• 2011

The goal of this paper is reducing the test time for AMBA-based SoC. To achieve this goal, the design technique that can test several cores concurrently by reusing AMBA as TAM is proposed. The additional control logic for structural parallel core test is minimized by reusing TIC which is originally used for functional test of AMBA. SoC reliability and test time reduction can be significantly achieved with the concurrent core test technique as well as functional test.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.39B no.1
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• pp.1-7
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• 2014

This paper proposes an efficient test wrapper design that reduces overall test time in multi-core SoC. After initial local wrapper solution sets for all the cores are determined using well-known Combine algorithm, proposed algorithm selects a dominant core which consumes the longest test time in multi-core SoC. Then, the wrapper characteristics in the number of TAM wires and the test time for other cores are adjusted based on test time of the dominant core. For some specific cores, the number of TAM wires can be reduced by increasing its test time for design space exploration purposes. These modified wrapper characteristics are added to the previous wrapper solution set. By expanding previous local wrapper solution set to global wrapper solution set, overall test time for Multi-core SoC can be reduced by an efficient test scheduler. Effectiveness of the proposed wrapper is verified on ITC'02 benchmark circuits using $B^*$-tree based test scheduler. Our experimental results show that the test time is reduced by an average of 4.7% when compared to that of employing previous wrappers.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.44 no.11
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• pp.65-73
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• 2007

This paper introduces design-for-test (DFT) techniques for low-cost system-on-chip (SoC) test. We present a Scan-Test method that controls IEEE 1500 wrapper thorough IEEE 1149.1 SoC TAP (Test Access Port) and design an at-speed test clock generator for delay fault test. Test cost can be reduced by using small number of test interface pins and on-chip test clock generator because we can use low-price automated test equipments (ATE). Experimental results evaluate the efficiency of the proposed method and show that the delay fault test of different cores running at different clocks test can be simultaneously achieved.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.50 no.9
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• pp.60-67
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• 2013

Test cost reduction is necessary to test a complex System-on-a-Chip(SoC) which adopts various Intellectual Properties (IP). In this paper, test architecture with low pin count which is able to IP-based SoC test, using IEEE Std. 1149.7 and IEEE Std. 1500, is proposed. IEEE Std. 1500 provides independent access mechanism for each IP in IP-based SoC test. In this paper, just two test pins are required by composing that these independent access mechanism can be controlled by IEEE Std. 1149.7. The number of Chips which are tested at the same time is increased by reducing required test pin count at wafer and package level test, and consequently the overall manufacturing test cost will be reduced significantly.

• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.35 no.6
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• pp.284-292
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• 2008

The density of Memory has been increased by great challenge for memory technology; therefore, elements of memory become more smaller than before and the sensitivity to faults increases. As a result of these changes, memory testing becomes more complex. In addition, as the number of storage elements per chip increases, the test cost becomes more remarkable as the cost per transistor drops. Recent development in system-on-chip(SoC) technology makes it possible to incorporate large embedded memories into a chip. However, it also complicates the test process, since usually the embedded memories cannot be controlled from the external environment. We present a ARM processor-programmable built-in self-test(BIST) scheme suitable for embedded memory testing in the SoC environment. The proposed BIST circuit can be programmed vis an on-chip microprocessor.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.40 no.1
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• pp.61-71
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• 2003

Interconnect test for highly integrated environments like SoC, becomes more important as the complexity of a circuit increases. This importance is from two facts, test time and complete diagnosis. Since the interconnect test between IPs is based on the scan technology such as IEEE1149.1 and IEEE P1500, it takes long test time to apply test vectors serially through a long scan chain. Complete diagnosis is another important issue because a defect on interconnects are shown as a defect on a chip. But generally, interconnect test algorithms that need the short test time can not do complete diagnosis and algorithms that perform complete diagnosis need long test time. A new interconnect test algorithm is developed. The new algorithm can provide a complete diagnosis for all faults with shorter test length compared to the previous algorithms.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.41 no.9
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• pp.85-95
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• 2004

As the design complexity increases, it is a major problem that the size of test pattern is large and power consumption is high in scan, especially system-on-a-chip(SoC), with the automatic test equipment(ATE). Because static compaction of test patterns heads to higher power for testing, it is very hard to reduce the test pattern volume for low power testing. This paper proposes an efficient compression/decompression algorithm based on run-length coding for reducing the amount of test data for low power testing that must be stored on a tester and be transferred to SoC. The experimental results show that the new algorithm is very efficient by reducing the memory space for test patterns and the hardware overhead for the decoder.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.43 no.1 s.343
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• pp.71-78
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• 2006

An NoC (Networks-on-Chip) is an emerging design paradigm intended to cope with a future SoC containing numerous built-in cores. In an NoC, the test strategy is very significant for its practicality and feasibility. Among existing test issues, TAM architecture and test scheduling will particularly dominate the overall test performance. In this paper, we address an efficient NoC test scheduling algorithm based on a rectangle packing approach used for an SoC test. In order to adopt the rectangle packing solution as an NoC test scheduling algorithm we design the configuration about test resources and test methods suitable for an NoC structure. Experimental results using some ITC'02 benchmark circuits show the proposed algorithm can reduce the overall test time by up to $55\%$ in comparison with previous works.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.43 no.10 s.352
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• pp.74-79
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• 2006

Test Interface Controller (TIC) provided by ARM Ltd. is widely used for functional testing of System-on-Chip (SoC) adopting Advanced Microcontroller Bus Architecture (AMBA) bus system. Accordingly, this architecture has a deficiency of not being able to concurrently shifting in and out the structural scan test patterns through the TIC and AMBA bus. This paper introduces a new AMBA based Test Access Mechanism (ATAM) for speedy testing of SoCs embedding ARM cores. While preserving the compatability with the ARM TIC, since scan in and out operations can be performed simultaneously, test application time through the expensive Automatic Test Equipment (ATE) can be drastically reduced.