Challenges and solutions for thermal-aware SOC testing

High temperature has negative impact on the performance, reliability and lifespan of a system on chip. During testing, the chip can be overheated due to a substantial increase of switching activities and concurrent tests in order to reduce test application time. This paper discusses several issues related to the thermal problem during SoC testing. It will then present a thermal-aware SoC test scheduling technique to generate the shortest test schedule such that the temperature constraints of individual cores and the constraint on the test-bus bandwidth are satisfied. In order to avoid overheating during the test, we partition test sets into shorter test sub-sequences and add cooling periods in between. Further more, we interleave the test sub-sequences from different test sets in such a manner that the test-bus bandwidth reserved for one core is utilized during its cooling period for the test transportation and application of the other cores. We have developed a heuristic to minimize the test application time by exploring alternative test partitioning and interleaving schemes with variable length of test sub-sequences and cooling periods. Experimental results have shown the efficiency of the proposed heuristic.