SoC Test: Trends and Recent Standards

The well-known approaching test cost crisis, where semiconductor test costs begin to approach or exceed manufacturing costs has led test engineers to apply new solutions to the problem of testing System-On-Chip (SoC) designs containing multiple IP (Intellectual Property) cores. While it is not yet possible to apply generic test architectures to an IP core within a SoC, the emergence of a number of similar approaches, and the release of new industry standards, such as IEEE 1500 and IEEE 1450.6, may begin to change this situation. This paper looks at these standards and at some techniques currently used by SoC test engineers. An extensive reference list is included, reflecting the purpose of this publication as a review paper

On-chip test infrastructure design for optimal multi-site testing of system chips

Multi-site testing is a popular and effective way to increase test throughput and reduce test costs. We present a test throughput model, in which we focus on wafer testing, and consider parameters like test time, index time, abort-on-fail, and contact yield. Conventional multi-site testing requires sufficient ATE resources, such as ATE channels, to allow the test of multiple SOCs in parallel. In this paper, we design and optimize on-chip DfT in order to maximize the test throughput for a given SOC and ATE. The onchip DfT consists of an E-RPCT wrapper, and, for modular SOCs, module wrappers and TAMs. We present experimental results for a Philips SOC and several ITC'02 SOC test benchmarks