2,559 research outputs found
Fault Testing for Reversible Circuits
Applications of reversible circuits can be found in the fields of low-power
computation, cryptography, communications, digital signal processing, and the
emerging field of quantum computation. Furthermore, prototype circuits for
low-power applications are already being fabricated in CMOS. Regardless of the
eventual technology adopted, testing is sure to be an important component in
any robust implementation.
We consider the test set generation problem. Reversibility affects the
testing problem in fundamental ways, making it significantly simpler than for
the irreversible case. For example, we show that any test set that detects all
single stuck-at faults in a reversible circuit also detects all multiple
stuck-at faults. We present efficient test set constructions for the standard
stuck-at fault model as well as the usually intractable cell-fault model. We
also give a practical test set generation algorithm, based on an integer linear
programming formulation, that yields test sets approximately half the size of
those produced by conventional ATPG.Comment: 30 pages, 8 figures. to appear in IEEE Trans. on CA
Testing Microfluidic Fully Programmable Valve Arrays (FPVAs)
Fully Programmable Valve Array (FPVA) has emerged as a new architecture for
the next-generation flow-based microfluidic biochips. This 2D-array consists of
regularly-arranged valves, which can be dynamically configured by users to
realize microfluidic devices of different shapes and sizes as well as
interconnections. Additionally, the regularity of the underlying structure
renders FPVAs easier to integrate on a tiny chip. However, these arrays may
suffer from various manufacturing defects such as blockage and leakage in
control and flow channels. Unfortunately, no efficient method is yet known for
testing such a general-purpose architecture. In this paper, we present a novel
formulation using the concept of flow paths and cut-sets, and describe an
ILP-based hierarchical strategy for generating compact test sets that can
detect multiple faults in FPVAs. Simulation results demonstrate the efficacy of
the proposed method in detecting manufacturing faults with only a small number
of test vectors.Comment: Design, Automation and Test in Europe (DATE), March 201
Cell replication and redundancy elimination during placement for cycle time optimization
This paper presents a new timing driven approach for cell replication tailored to the practical needs of standard cell layout design. Cell replication methods have been studied extensively in the context of generic partitioning problems. However, until now it has remained unclear what practical benefit can be obtained from this concept in a realistic environment for timing driven layout synthesis. Therefore, this paper presents a timing driven cell replication procedure, demonstrates its incorporation into a standard cell placement and routing tool and examines its benefit on the final circuit performance in comparison with conventional gate or transistor sizing techniques. Furthermore, we demonstrate that cell replication can deteriorate the stuck-at fault testability of circuits and show that stuck-at redundancy elimination must be integrated into the placement procedure. Experimental results demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed methodology and suggest that cell replication should be an integral part of the physical design flow complementing traditional gate sizing techniques
Transition-fault test generation
Due to the character of the original source materials and the nature of batch digitization, quality control issues may be present in this document. Please report any quality issues you encounter to [email protected], referencing the URI of the item.Includes bibliographical references (leaf 18).After an integrated circuit is manufactured, it must be tested to insure that it is not defective. Specifically, timing defects are becoming increasingly important to detect because of the decreasing process geometries and increasing clock rates. One way to detect these timing defects is to apply test patterns to the integrated circuit that are generated using the transition-fault model. Unfortunately, industry's current transition-fault test generation schemes produce test sets that are too large to store in the memory of the tester. The proposed methods of test generation utilize stuck-at-fault tests to create transition-fault test sets of a smaller size. Greedy algorithms are used in the generation of both the stuck-at-fault and transition-fault tests. In addition, various methods of test set compaction are explored to further reduce the size of the test sets. This research demonstrates an effective way to generate compact transition-fault test sets for a benchmark circuit and holds great promise for application to large commercial circuits
DFT and BIST of a multichip module for high-energy physics experiments
Engineers at Politecnico di Torino designed a multichip module for high-energy physics experiments conducted on the Large Hadron Collider. An array of these MCMs handles multichannel data acquisition and signal processing. Testing the MCM from board to die level required a combination of DFT strategie
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