An Integrated Framework for Concurrent Test and Wireless Control in Complex SoCs

System-on-chip (SoC) is evolving as a new design style, where an entire system is built by reusing pre-designed, pre-verified IP (intellectual property) cores. Embedded with numerous heterogeneous and complex IP cores, an SoC can be viewed as an interconnected network of various functional modules. This new design style shortens time-to-market while meeting various design requirements, such as high performance, low power, and low cost, compared to the traditional system-on-board (SoB) design. In the meantime, however, embedded core-based SoC test becomes a challenging task due to IP protection. In particular, there are three major issues to be addressed in SoC test: (1) a test access path needs to be constructed for each core to propagate test stimulus and collect test responses, (2) one needs to partition test resources and schedule IP cores to achieve maximum parallelism, and (3) a test control network is needed to initialize different test resources used in the test application and observe the corresponding test results at appropriate instants. In this dissertation, we develop cost-effective SoC test and diagnosis solutions from various crucial aspects, such as test time, test access architecture, and memory depth on automatic test equipment (ATE). It is the very first work that introduces radio frequency (RF) technology into SoC test control for the forthcoming billion-transistor era. We mainly address two research issues: integrated testability design and optimization of SoC test solutions, and on-chip wireless test control network design. We first develop a general test model for SoC testability analysis, test scheduling, and test diagnosis. We then propose several test scheduling algorithms with the consideration of various test constraints such as resource sharing, power dissipation, and fault coverage, and develop an integrated framework that combines wrapper design, test access mechanism (TAM) configuration, and test scheduling. More specifically, we propose a fault model oriented test set selection scheme and formulate the test scheduling as a shortest path problem with the feature of evenly balanced resource usage. We also propose a dynamic test partitioning technique based on the test compatibility graph to address the power-constrained test scheduling problem. Furthermore, we develop an integrated framework to handle constrained scheduling in a way that constructs core access paths and distributes TAM bandwidth among cores, and consequently configures the wrapper scan chains for TAM width adaptation. Using the “Radio-on-Chip” technology, we introduce a novel test control xiii network to transmit control signals chip-wide by RF links. We propose three types of wireless test control architectures, i.e., a miniature wireless local area network, a multihop wireless test control network, and a distributed multihop wireless test control network. The proposed architectures consist of three basic components, namely the test scheduler, the resource configurators, and the RF nodes supporting the communication between the scheduler and the IP cores. Under the multilevel tree structure, the system optimization is performed on control constrained resource partitioning and distribution. Several challenging system design issues such as RF nodes placement, clustering, and routing, are studied along with integrated resource distribution (including not only the circuit blocks to perform testing, but also the on-chip RF nodes for intra-chip communication) and test scheduling (concurrent core testing as well as interconnect testing). Cost oriented optimization technique is developed which addresses several highly interdependent design issues to achieve the minimum overall testing cost.