CAREER: Spectral Techniques for Functional Testing of Sequential Circuits and System-On-A-Chip

Rutgers University New Brunswick, New Brunswick NJ

Investigators

Abstract

While current circuit testing techniques are limited by the increasing circuit size, the proposed research explores a new concept of spectrum-based test generation to tackle testing of increasingly large and complex circuits. A state-of-the-art spectrum-based technique for chip functional testing is being explored that achieves extremely high fault coverages in short execution times. In this approach, the circuit is viewed as a system identifiable by its input-output characteristics instead of a traditional netlist of primitives. Spectral characteristics are extracted and analyzed for the input/output signals of the system under test, and the resulting data are used to predict and construct intelligent test patterns. In addition, this functional spectral knowledge also provides new means for built-in-self-test (BIST), applicable also for system-on-a-chip. This research addresses the relevant issues in the spectrum-based testing framework: (a) the development of various techniques for spectral extraction for a given circuit; (b) the analysis of different spectral bases (orthogonal and non-orthogonal) and how they can influence spectral characteristics for testing; and (c) the application of transform domain to identify dominant frequency components to generate intelligent patterns.