Scalable algorithms for software based self test using formal methods

textTransistor scaling has kept up with Moore's law with a doubling of the number of transistors on a chip. More logic on a chip means more opportunities for manufacturing defects to slip in. This, in turn, has made processor testing after manufacturing a significant challenge. At-speed functional testing, being completely non-intrusive, has been seen as the ideal way of testing chips. However for processor testing, generating instruction level tests for covering all faults is a challenge given the issue of scalability. Data-path faults are relatively easier to control and observe compared to control-path faults. In this research we present a novel method to generate instruction level tests for hard to detect control-path faults in a processor. We initially map the gate level stuck-at fault to the Register Transfer Level (RTL) and build an equivalent faulty RTL model. The fault activation and propagation constraints are captured using Control and Data Flow Graphs of the RTL as a Liner Temporal Logic (LTL) property. This LTL property is then negated and given to a Bounded Model Checker based on a Bit-Vector Satisfiability Module Theories (SMT) solver. From the counter-example to the property we can extract a sequence of instructions that activates the gate level fault and propagates the fault effect to one of the observable points in the design. Other than the user supplying instruction constraints, this approach is completely automatic and does not require any manual intervention. Not all the design behaviors are required to generate a test for a fault. We use this insight to scale our previous methodology further. Underapproximations are design abstractions that only capture a subset of the original design behaviors. The use of RTL for test generation affords us two types of under-approximations: bit-width reduction and operator approximation. These are abstractions that perform reductions based on semantics of the RTL design. We also explore structural reductions of the RTL, called path based search, where we search through error propagation paths incrementally. This approach increases the size of the test generation problem step by step. In this way the SMT solver searches through the state space piecewise rather than doing the entire search at once. Experimental results show that our methods are robust and scalable for generating functional tests for hard to detect faults.Electrical and Computer Engineerin

New techniques for functional testing of microprocessor based systems

Electronic devices may be affected by failures, for example due to physical defects. These defects may be introduced during the manufacturing process, as well as during the normal operating life of the device due to aging. How to detect all these defects is not a trivial task, especially in complex systems such as processor cores. Nevertheless, safety-critical applications do not tolerate failures, this is the reason why testing such devices is needed so to guarantee a correct behavior at any time. Moreover, testing is a key parameter for assessing the quality of a manufactured product. Consolidated testing techniques are based on special Design for Testability (DfT) features added in the original design to facilitate test effectiveness. Design, integration, and usage of the available DfT for testing purposes are fully supported by commercial EDA tools, hence approaches based on DfT are the standard solutions adopted by silicon vendors for testing their devices. Tests exploiting the available DfT such as scan-chains manipulate the internal state of the system, differently to the normal functional mode, passing through unreachable configurations. Alternative solutions that do not violate such functional mode are defined as functional tests. In microprocessor based systems, functional testing techniques include software-based self-test (SBST), i.e., a piece of software (referred to as test program) which is uploaded in the system available memory and executed, with the purpose of exciting a specific part of the system and observing the effects of possible defects affecting it. SBST has been widely-studies by the research community for years, but its adoption by the industry is quite recent. My research activities have been mainly focused on the industrial perspective of SBST. The problem of providing an effective development flow and guidelines for integrating SBST in the available operating systems have been tackled and results have been provided on microprocessor based systems for the automotive domain. Remarkably, new algorithms have been also introduced with respect to state-of-the-art approaches, which can be systematically implemented to enrich SBST suites of test programs for modern microprocessor based systems. The proposed development flow and algorithms are being currently employed in real electronic control units for automotive products. Moreover, a special hardware infrastructure purposely embedded in modern devices for interconnecting the numerous on-board instruments has been interest of my research as well. This solution is known as reconfigurable scan networks (RSNs) and its practical adoption is growing fast as new standards have been created. Test and diagnosis methodologies have been proposed targeting specific RSN features, aimed at checking whether the reconfigurability of such networks has not been corrupted by defects and, in this case, at identifying the defective elements of the network. The contribution of my work in this field has also been included in the first suite of public-domain benchmark networks

Design of On-Chip Self-Testing Signature Register

Over the last few years, scan test has turn out to be too expensive to implement for industry standard designs due to increasing test data volume and test time. The test cost of a chip is mainly governed by the resource utilization of Automatic Test Equipment (ATE). Also, it directly depends upon test time that includes time required to load test program, to apply test vectors and to analyze generated test response of the chip. An issue of test time and data volume is increasingly appealing designers to use on-chip test data compactors, either on input side or output side or both. Such techniques significantly address the former issues but have little hold over increasing number of input-outputs under test mode. Further, test pins on DUT are increasing over the generations. Thus, scan channels on test floor are falling short in number for placement of such ICs. To address issues discussed above, we introduce an on-chip self-testing signature register. It comprises a response compactor and a comparator. The compactor compacts large chunk of response data to a small test signature whereas the comparator compares this test signature with desired one. The overall test result for the design is generated on single output pin. Being no storage of test response is demanded, the considerable reduction in ATE memory can be observed. Also, with only single pin to be monitored for test result, the number of tester channels and compare edges on ATE side significantly reduce at the end of the test. This cuts down maintenance and usage cost of test floor and increases its life time. Furthermore reduction in test pins gives scope for DFT engineers to increase number of scan chains so as to further reduce test time

Technology Mapping, Design for Testability, and Circuit Optimizations for NULL Convention Logic Based Architectures

Delay-insensitive asynchronous circuits have been the target of a renewed research effort because of the advantages they offer over traditional synchronous circuits. Minimal timing analysis, inherent robustness against power-supply, temperature, and process variations, reduced energy consumption, less noise and EMI emission, and easy design reuse are some of the benefits of these circuits. NULL Convention Logic (NCL) is one of the mainstream asynchronous logic design paradigms that has been shown to be a promising method for designing delay-insensitive asynchronous circuits. This dissertation investigates new areas in NCL design and test and is made of three sections. The first section discusses different CMOS implementations of NCL gates and proposes new circuit techniques to enhance their operation. The second section focuses on mapping multi-rail logic expressions to a standard NCL gate library, which is a form of technology mapping for a category of NCL design automation flows. Finally, the last section proposes design for testability techniques for a recently developed low-power variant of NCL called Sleep Convention Logic (SCL)

Pseudo-functional testing: bridging the gap between manufacturing test and functional operation.

Yuan, Feng.Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2009.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 60-65).Abstract also in Chinese.Abstract --- p.iAcknowledgement --- p.iiChapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1Chapter 1.1 --- Manufacturing Test --- p.1Chapter 1.1.1 --- Functional Testing vs. Structural Testing --- p.2Chapter 1.1.2 --- Fault Model --- p.3Chapter 1.1.3 --- Automatic Test Pattern Generation --- p.4Chapter 1.1.4 --- Design for Testability --- p.6Chapter 1.2 --- Pseudo-Functional Manufacturing Test --- p.13Chapter 1.3 --- Thesis Motivation and Organization --- p.16Chapter 2 --- On Systematic Illegal State Identification --- p.19Chapter 2.1 --- Introduction --- p.19Chapter 2.2 --- Preliminaries and Motivation --- p.20Chapter 2.3 --- What is the Root Cause of Illegal States? --- p.22Chapter 2.4 --- Illegal State Identification Flow --- p.26Chapter 2.5 --- Justification Scheme Construction --- p.30Chapter 2.6 --- Experimental Results --- p.34Chapter 2.7 --- Conclusion --- p.35Chapter 3 --- Compression-Aware Pseudo-Functional Testing --- p.36Chapter 3.1 --- Introduction --- p.36Chapter 3.2 --- Motivation --- p.38Chapter 3.3 --- Proposed Methodology --- p.40Chapter 3.4 --- Pattern Generation in Compression-Aware Pseudo-Functional Testing --- p.42Chapter 3.4.1 --- Circuit Pre-Processing --- p.42Chapter 3.4.2 --- Pseudo-Functional Random Pattern Generation with Multi-Launch Cycles --- p.43Chapter 3.4.3 --- Compressible Test Pattern Generation for Pseudo-Functional Testing --- p.45Chapter 3.5 --- Experimental Results --- p.52Chapter 3.5.1 --- Experimental Setup --- p.52Chapter 3.5.2 --- Results and Discussion --- p.54Chapter 3.6 --- Conclusion --- p.56Chapter 4 --- Conclusion and Future Work --- p.58Bibliography --- p.6

New Techniques for On-line Testing and Fault Mitigation in GPUs

L'abstract è presente nell'allegato / the abstract is in the attachmen

CUDA-accelerated delay fault simulation

In todays VLSI chip manufacturing processes variations occur, that may manifest as delay defects and affect the timing behaviour of the circuit. In general, these delay faults only occur under at-speed test conditions and it requires special effort to simulate them. Since fault simulation is inherently parallelizable, NVIDIAs Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) is used for utilizing general purpose graphics processing units (GPGPUs) in order to exploit available parallelism. The goal of this study thesis was the implementation of a delay fault simulator to simulate the behaviour of small delay faults on CUDA devices and its integration into a diagnosis framework for application of the Partially Overlapping Impact couNTER (POINTER) algorithm. A series of experiments was performed to observe the diagnosability of the delay faults