On-chip instrumentation is mandatory for efficient bring-up, test and diagnosis, post-silicon validation, as well as in-field calibration, maintenance, and fault tolerance. Reconfigurable scan networks (RSNs) provide a scalable and efficient scan-based access mechanism to such instruments. The correct operation of this access mechanism is crucial for all manufacturing, bring-up and debug tasks as well as for in-field operation, but it can be affected by faults and design errors.This work develops for the first time fault-tolerant RSNs such that the resulting scan network still provides access to as many instruments as possible in presence of a fault. The work contributes a model and an algorithm to compute scan paths in faulty RSNs, a metric to quantify its fault tolerance and a synthesis algorithm that is based on graph connectivity and selective hardening of control logic in the scan network. Experimental results demonstrate that fault-tolerant RSNs can be synthesized with only moderate hardware overhead.

With today's tight timing margins, increasing manufacturing variations, and new defect behaviors in FinFETs, effective yield learning requires detailed information on the population of small delay defects in fabricated chips. Small delay fault diagnosis for yield learning faces two main challenges: (1) production test responses are usually highly compressed reducing the amount of available failure data, and (2) failure signatures not only depend on the actual defect but also on omnipresent and unknown delay variations. This work presents the very first diagnosis algorithm specifically designed to diagnose timing issues on compressed test responses and under process variations. An innovative combination of variation-invariant structural analysis, GPU-accelerated time-simulation, and variation-tolerant syndrome matching for compressed test responses allows the proposed algorithm to cope with both challenges. Experiments on large benchmark circuits clearly demonstrate the scalability and superior accuracy of the new diagnosis approach.

Marginal hardware introduces severe reliability threats throughout the life cycle of a system. Although marginalities may not affect the functionality of a circuit immediately after manufacturing, they can degrade into hard failures and must be screened out during manufacturing test to prevent early life failures. Furthermore, their evolution in the field must be proactively monitored by periodic tests before actual failures occur. In recent years, small delay faults (SDFs) have gained increasing attention as possible indicators of marginal hardware. However, SDFs on short paths may be undetectable even with advanced timing aware ATPG. Faster-than-at-speed test (FAST) can detect such hidden delay faults (HDFs), but so far FAST has mainly been restricted to manufacturing test. This paper presents a fully autonomous built-in self-test approach for FAST, which supports in-field testing by appropriate strategies for test generation and response compaction. In particular, the required test frequencies for HDF detection are selected, such that hardware overhead and test time are minimized. Furthermore, test response compaction handles the large number of unknowns (X-values) on long paths by storing intermediate MISR-signatures in a small on-chip memory for later analysis using X-canceling transformations. A comprehensive experimental study demonstrates the effectiveness of the presented approach. In particular, the impact of the considered fault size is studied in detail.

This paper presents a novel test architecture that combines the advantages of high-quality deterministic scan-based test and low-cost built-in self-test. The main idea is to record (store) all required compressed test data in a novel scan chain structure, and extract and decompress them during testing. This requires a very high compression ratio to obtain a low test data volume, that is, smaller than the number of scan cells in the circuit under test. To achieve such a high compression ratio, we propose a novel compression method that combines broadcast scan as well as a tailored single-input compression architecture. We also utilize the concept of scan chain partitioning and clock gating to reduce the test time and test power. An on-chip test controller is employed to automatically generate all required control signals for the whole test procedure. This significantly reduces the requirements on external automatic test equipment. Experimental results show that our method is well suitable for multicore designs. For example, experiments on the 8-core open-source OpenSPARC T2 processor with 5.7M gates show that all required test data for 100% testable stuck-at fault coverage can be stored in just 59.4% of the scan cells of the processor. Experimental results for transition faults are also presented, which show that more identical cores are needed in order to store all test data for transition faults. We also discuss how to extend this paper to address fault diagnosis and engineering change order problems.

Timing-accurate simulation of circuits is an important task in design validation of modern nano-scale CMOS circuits. With shrinking technology nodes, detailed simulation models down to transistor level have to be considered. While conventional simulation at logic level lacks the ability to accurately model timing behavior for complex cells, more accurate simulation at lower abstraction levels becomes computationally expensive for larger designs. This work presents the first parallel multi-level waveform-accurate timing simulation approach on graphics processing units (GPUs). The simulation uses logic and switch level abstraction concurrently, thus allowing to combine their advantages by trading off speed and accuracy. The abstraction can be lowered in arbitrary regions of interest to locally increase the accuracy. Waveform transformations allow for transparent switching between the abstraction levels. With the utilization of GPUs and thoughtful unification of algorithms and data structures, a fast and versatile high-throughput multi-level simulation is obtained that is scalable for millions of cells while achieving runtime savings of up to 89% compared to full simulation at switch level.

Modern systems-on-chip (SoC) designs are requiring more and more infrastructure for validation, debug, volume test as well as in-field maintenance and repair. Reconfigurable scan networks (RSNs), as allowed by IEEE 1687 (IJTAG) standard, provide flexible access to the infrastructure with low access latency. However, they can also pose a security threat to the system, by leaking information about the system state. In this paper, we present a protection method that monitors access and checks for violations of security properties online. The method prevents unauthorized access to sensitive and secure instruments. In addition, the system integrator can specify more complex security requirements, including giving multiple users different access privileges. Simultaneous accesses to multiple instruments, that would expose sensitive data to an untrusted core (e.g. from 3rd party vendors) or instrument, can be prohibited. The method does not require any change to the RSN architecture and is easily integrable with IP core designs. The area overhead with respect to the size of the RSN is below 6% and scales well with larger networks.

Reconfigurable Scan Networks (RSNs) allow flexible access to embedded instruments for post-silicon validation and debug or diagnosis. However, this scan infrastructure can also be exploited to leak or corrupt critical information as observation and controllability of registers deep inside the circuit are increased. Securing an RSN is mandatory for maintaining safe and secure circuit operations but difficult due to its complex data flow dependencies. This work proposes a method that detects security violations and transforms a given insecure RSN into a secure RSN for which the secure data flow as specified by a user is guaranteed by construction. The presented method is guided by user-defined cost functions that target e.g., test performance or wiring cost. We provide a case study and experimental results demonstrating the applicability of the method to large designs with low runtime.

Design, production and operation of modern system-on-chips rely on integrated instruments, which range from simple sensors to complex debug interfaces and design-for-test (DfT) structures. Reconfigurable scan networks (RSNs) as defined in IEEE Std. 1687-2014 provide an efficient access mechanism to such instruments. It is essential to test the access mechanism itself before it can be used for test, diagnosis, validation, calibration or runtime monitoring. Realistic fault mechanisms in RSNs are hard to test due to their high sequential depth and limited controllability and observability via serial scan ports.We present a novel low-cost DfT modification specifically designed for RSNs that enhances the observability of shadow registers. Furthermore, we present different test methods for stuck-at and more realistic gate-level fault models like flip-flop-internal and bridge faults. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the presented DfT modification and test methods.

A large amount of on-chip infrastructure, such as design-for-test, debug, monitoring, or calibration, is required for the efficient manufacturing, debug, and operation of complex hardware systems. The access to such infrastructure poses severe system safety and security threats since it may constitute a side-channel exposing internal state, sensitive data, or IP to attackers. Reconfigurable scan networks (RSNs) have been proposed as a scalable and flexible scan-based access mechanism to on-chip infrastructure. The increasing number and variety of integrated infrastructure as well as diverse access constraints over the system lifetime demand for systematic methods for the specification and formal verification of access protection and security properties in RSNs. This work presents a novel method to specify and verify fine-grained access permissions and restrictions to instruments attached to an RSN. The permissions and restrictions are transformed into predicates that are added to a formal model of a given RSN to prove which access properties hold or do not hold.

The accessibility of on-chip embedded infrastructure for test, reconfiguration, or debug poses a serious security problem. Access mechanisms based on IEEE Std 1149.1 (JTAG), and especially reconfigurable scan networks (RSNs), as allowed by IEEE Std 1500, IEEE Std 1149.1-2013, and IEEE Std 1687 (IJTAG), require special care in the design and development. This work studies the threats to trustworthy data transmission in RSNs posed by untrusted components within the RSN and external interfaces. We propose a novel scan pattern generation method that finds trustworthy access sequences to prevent sniffing and spoofing of transmitted data in the RSN. For insecure RSNs, for which such accesses do not exist, we present an automated transformation that improves the security and trustworthiness while preserving the accessibility to attached instruments. The area overhead is reduced based on results from trustworthy access pattern generation. As a result, sensitive data is not exposed to untrusted components in the RSN, and compromised data cannot be injected during trustworthy accesses.

Excessive IR-drop during scan shift can cause localized IR-drop around clock buffers and introduce dynamic clock skew. Excessive clock skew at neighboring scan flip-flops results in hold or setup timing violations corrupting test stimuli or test responses during shifting. We introduce a new method to assess the risk of such test data corruption at each scan cycle and flip-flop. The most likely cases of test data corruption are mitigated in a non-intrusive way by selective test data manipulation and masking of affected responses. Evaluation results show the computational feasibility of our method for large benchmark circuits, and demonstrate that a few targeted pattern changes provide large potential gains in shift safety and test time with negligible cost in fault coverage.

Small delay faults receive more and more attention, since they may indicate a circuit reliability marginality even if they do not violate the timing at the time of production. At-speed test and faster-than-at-speed test (FAST) are rather expensive tasks to test for such faults. The paper at hand avoids complex on-chip structures or expensive high-speed ATE for test response evaluation, if aging monitors which are integrated into the device under test anyway are reused. The main challenge in reusing aging monitors for FAST consists in possible false alerts at higher frequencies. While a certain test vector pair makes a delay fault observable at one monitor, it may also exceed the time slack in the fault free case at a different monitor which has to be masked. Therefore, a multidimensional optimizing problem has to be solved for minimizing the masking overhead and the number of test vectors while maximizing delay fault coverage.

Runtime reconfigurable architectures based on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) allow areaand power-efficient acceleration of complex applications. However, being manufactured in latest semiconductor process technologies, FPGAs are increasingly prone to aging effects, which reduce the reliability and lifetime of such systems. Aging mitigation and fault tolerance techniques for the reconfigurable fabric become essential to realize dependable reconfigurable architectures. This article presents an accelerator diversification method that creates multiple configurations for runtime reconfigurable accelerators that are diversified in their usage of Configurable Logic Blocks (CLBs). In particular, it creates a minimal number of configurations such that all single-CLB and some multi-CLB faults can be tolerated. For each fault we ensure that there is at least one configuration that does not use that CLB. Second, a novel runtime accelerator placement algorithm is presented that exploits the diversity in resource usage of these configurations to balance the stress imposed by executions of the accelerators on the reconfigurable fabric. By tracking the stress due to accelerator usage at runtime, the stress is balanced both within a reconfigurable region as well as over all reconfigurable regions of the system. The accelerator placement algorithm also considers faulty CLBs in the regions and selects the appropriate configuration such that the system maintains a high performance in presence of multiple permanent faults. Experimental results demonstrate that our methods deliver up to 3.7× higher performance in presence of faults at marginal runtime costs and 1.6× higher MTTF than state-ofthe-art aging mitigation methods.

Through silicon vias (TSVs) play an important role in 3-D chip integration. Effective and efficient testing for correct operation of TSVs is essential for 3-D integrated circuit design. This paper addresses the post-bond test and diagnosis of crosstalk faults among TSVs considering different impact ranges, and proposes a TSV grouping method for rectangular and hexagonal TSV placements such that as many TSVs as possible are tested simultaneously. Based on the results of the TSV grouping, we implement a high-efficiency, low-area-overhead TSV test architecture that reuses the existing boundary scan or IEEE 1500 wrapper cells typically present for prebond testing. Experimental results show the short test and diagnosis time as well as the low area overhead of the proposed test architecture.

Delay fault simulation is an essential task during test pattern generation and reliability assessment of electronic circuits. With the high sensitivity of current nano-scale designs toward even smallest delay deviations, the simulation of small gate delay faults has become extremely important. Since these faults have a subtle impact on the timing behavior, traditional fault simulation approaches based on abstract timing models are not sufficient. Furthermore, the detection of these faults is compromised by the ubiquitous variations in the manufacturing processes, which causes the actual fault coverage to vary from circuit instance to circuit instance, and makes the use of timing accurate methods mandatory. However, the application of timing accurate techniques quickly becomes infeasible for larger designs due to excessive computational requirements. In this paper, we present a method for fast and waveform-accurate simulation of small delay faults on graphics processing units with exceptional computational performance. By exploiting multiple dimensions of parallelism from gates, faults, waveforms, and circuit instances, the proposed approach allows for timing-accurate and exhaustive small delay fault simulation under process variation for designs with millions of gates.

Unknown (X) values in a design introduce pessimism in conventional test generation algorithms, which results in a loss of fault coverage. This pessimism is reduced by a more accurate modeling and analysis. Unfortunately, accurate analysis techniques highly increase runtime and limit scalability. One promising technique to prevent high runtimes while still providing high accuracy is the use of restricted symbolic logic (RSL). However, also pure RSL-based algorithms reach their limits as soon as millon gate circuits need to be processed. In this paper, we propose new ATPG techniques to overcome such limitations. An efficient hybrid encoding combines the accuracy of RSL-based modeling with the compactness of conventional threevalued encoding. A low-cost two-valued SAT-based untestability check is able to classify most untestable faults with low runtime. An incremental and event-based accurate fault simulator is introduced to reduce fault simulation effort. The experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed techniques. On average, over 99.3% of the considered faults are accurately classified. Both the number of aborts and the total runtime are significantly reduced compared to the state-of-the-art pure RSL-based algorithm. For circuits up to a million gates, the fault coverage could be increased considerably compared to a state-of-the-art commercial tool with very competitive runtimes.

IR-drop induced false capture failures and test clock stretch are severe problems in at-speed scan testing. We propose a new method to efficiently and accurately identify these problems. For the first time, our approach considers the additional dynamic power caused by glitches, the spatial and temporal distribution of all toggles, and their impact on both logic paths and the clock tree without time-consuming electrical simulations.

On-chip infrastructure is an essential part of today's complex designs and enables their cost-efficient manufacturing and operation. The diversity and high number of infrastructure elements demands flexible and low-latency access mechanisms, such as reconfigurable scan networks (RSNs). The correct operation of the infrastructure access itself is highly important for the test of the system logic, its diagnosis, debug and bring-up, as well as post-silicon validation. Ensuring correct operation requires the thorough testing of the RSN.Because of sequential and combinational dependencies in RSN accesses, test generation for general RSNs is computationally very difficult and requires dedicated test strategies. This paper explores different test strategies for general RSNs and discusses the achieved structural fault coverage. Experimental results show that the combination of functional test heuristics together with a dedicated RSN test pattern generation approach significantly outperforms the test quality of a standard ATPG tool.

IEEE Std. 1687, or IJTAG, defines flexible serial scan-based architectures for accessing embedded instruments efficiently. In this paper, we present a novel test architecture that employs IEEE Std. 1687 together with an efficient test controller to carry out 3D-IC testing autonomously. The test controller can deliver parallel test data for the IEEE Std. 1687 structures and the cores under test, and provide required control signals to control the whole test procedure. This design can achieve at-speed, autonomous and programmable testing in 3D-ICs. Experimental results show that the additional area and test cycle overhead of this architecture is small considering its autonomous test capability.

We propose a fault tolerance approach for sparse matrix operations that detects and implicitly locates errors in the results for efficient local correction. This approach reduces the runtime overhead for fault tolerance and provides high error coverage. Existing algorithm-based fault tolerance approaches for sparse matrix operations detect and correct errors, but they often rely on expensive error localization steps. General checkpointing schemes can induce large recovery cost for high error rates. For sparse matrix-vector multiplications, experimental results show an average reduction in runtime overhead of 43.8%, while the error coverage is on average improved by 52.2% compared to related work. The practical applicability is demonstrated in a case study using the iterative Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient solver. When scaling the error rate by four orders of magnitude, the average runtime overhead increases only by 31.3% compared to low error rates.

Reconfigurable scan networks (RSN) as standardized by IEEE Std 1687 allow flexible and efficient access to on-chip infrastructure for test and diagnosis, post-silicon validation, debug, bring-up, or maintenance in the field. However, unauthorized access or manipulation of the attached instruments, monitors, or controllers pose security and safety risks. Different RSN architectures have recently been proposed to implement secure access to the connected instruments, for instance by authentication and authorization. To ensure that the implemented security schemes cannot be bypassed, design verification of the security properties is mandatory. However, combinational and deep sequential dependencies of modern RSNs and their extensions for security require novel approaches to formal verification for unbounded model checking. This work presents for the first time a formal design verification methodology for security properties of RSNs based on unbounded model checking that is able to verify access protection at logical level. Experimental results demonstrate that state-of-the-art security schemes for RSNs can be efficiently handled, even for very large designs.

This work proposes a novel test architecture that combines the advantages of both scan-based and built-in self-test (BIST) designs. The main idea is to record (store) all required compressed test data in a novel scan chain structure such that the stored data can be extracted, reconstructed and decompressed into required deterministic patterns using an on-chip test controller with a test pattern decompressor. The recording of test data is achieved by modifying the connections between scan cells. Techniques to extract test data from the modified scan cells and to deliver decompressed test patterns to the modified scan cells are presented. The on-chip test controller can automatically generate all required control signals for the whole test procedure. This significantly reduces the requirements on external ATE. Experimental results on OpenSPARC T2, a publicly accessible 8-core processor containing 5.7M gates, show that all required test data for 100% testable stuck-at fault coverage can be stored in the scan chains of the processor with less than 3% total area overhead for the whole test architecture.

IR-drop induced by launch switching activity (LSA) in capture mode during at-speed scan testing increases delay along not only logic paths (LPs) but also clock paths (Cps). Excessive extra delay along LPs compromises test yields due to false capture failures, while excessive extra delay along CPs compromises test quality due to test clock stretch. This paper is the first to mitigate the impact of LSA on both LPs and CPs with a novel LCPA (Logic/Clock Path-Aware) at-speed scan test generation scheme, featuring (1) a new metric for assessing the risk of false capture failures based on the amount of LSA around both LPs and CPs, (2) a procedure for avoiding false capture failures by reducing LSA around LPs or masking uncertain test responses, and (3) a procedure for reducing test clock stretch by reducing LSA around CPs. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the LCPA scheme in improving test yields and test quality.

Small gate delay faults (SDFs) are not detectable at-speed, if they can only be propagated along short paths. These hidden delay faults (HDFs) do not influence the circuit's behavior initially, but they may indicate design marginalities leading to early-life failures, and therefore they cannot be neglected. HDFs can be detected by faster-than-at-speed test (FAST), where typically several different frequencies are used to maximize the coverage. A given set of test patterns P potentially detects a HDF if it contains a test pattern sensitizing a path through the fault site, and the efficiency of FAST can be measured as the ratio of actually detected HDFs to potentially detected HDFs. The paper at hand targets maximum test efficiency with a minimum number of frequencies. The procedure starts with a test set for transition delay faults and a set of preselected equidistant frequencies. Timing-accurate simulation of this initial setup identifies the hard-to-detect faults, which are then targeted by a more complex timing-aware ATPG procedure. For the yet undetected HDFs, a minimum number of frequencies are determined using an efficient hypergraph algorithm. Experimental results show that with this approach, the number of test frequencies required for maximum test efficiency can be reduced considerably. Furthermore, test set inflation is limited as timing-aware ATPG is only used for a small subset of HDFs.

Failure diagnosis of field returns typically requires high quality test stimuli and assumes that tests can be repeated. For intermittent faults with fault activation conditions depending on the physical environment, the repetition of tests cannot ensure that the behavior in the field is also observed during diagnosis, causing field returns diagnosed as no-trouble-found. In safety critical applications, self-checking circuits, which provide concurrent error detection, are frequently used. To diagnose intermittent and transient faulty behavior in such circuits, we use the stored encoded circuit outputs in case of a failure (called signatures) for later analysis in diagnosis. For the first time, a diagnosis algorithm is presented that is capable of performing the classification of intermittent or transient faults using only the very limited amount of functional stimuli and signatures observed during operation and stored on chip. The experimental results demonstrate that even with these harsh limitations it is possible to distinguish intermittent from transient faulty behavior. This is essential to determine whether a circuit in which failures have been observed should be subject to later physical failure analysis, since intermittent faulty behavior has been diagnosed. In case of transient faulty behavior, it may still be operated reliably.

Aging effects in nano-scale CMOS circuits impair the reliability and Mean Time to Failure (MTTF) of embedded systems. Especially for FPGAs that are manufactured in the latest technology node, aging is amajor concern. We introduce the first cross-layer aging-aware placement method for accelerators in FPGA-based runtime reconfigurable architectures. It optimizes stress distribution by accelerator placement at runtime, i.e. to which reconfigurable region an accelerator shall be reconfigured. Additionally, it optimizes logic placement at synthesis time to diversify the resource usage of individual accelerators, i.e. which CLBs of a reconfigurable region shall be used by an accelerator. Both layers together balance the intra- and inter-region stress induced by the application workload at negligible performance cost. Experimental results show significant reduction of maximum stress of up to 64% and 35%, which leads to up to 177% and 14% MTTF improvement relative to state-of-the-art methods w.r.t. HCI and BTI aging, respectively.

Circuit aging causes a performance degradation and eventually a functional failure. It depends on the workload and the environmental condition of the system, which are hard to predict in early design phases resulting in pessimistic design. Existing delay monitoring schemes measure the remaining slack of paths in the circuit, but have a high hardware penalty including global wiring. More importantly, a low sensitization ratio of long paths in applications may lead to a very low measurement frequency or even unmonitored timing violations. In this work, we propose a delay monitor placement method by analyzing the topological circuit structure and sensitization of paths. The delay monitors are inserted at meticulously selected positions in the circuit, named observation points (OPs). This OP monitor placement method can reduce the number of inserted monitors by up to 98% compared to a placement at the end of long paths. The experimental validation shows the effectiveness of this aging indication, i.e. a monitor issues an alert always earlier than any imminent timing failure.

Linear system solvers are key components of many scientific applications and they can benefit significantly from modern heterogeneous computer architectures. However, such nano-scaled CMOS devices face an increasing number of reliability threats, which make the integration of fault tolerance mandatory. The preconditioned conjugate gradient method (PCG) is a very popular solver since it typically finds solutions faster than direct methods, and it is less vulnerable to transient effects. However, as latest research shows, the vulnerability is still considerable. Even single errors caused, for instance, by marginal hardware, harsh operating conditions or particle radiation can increase execution times considerably or corrupt solutions without indication. In this work, a novel and highly efficient fault-tolerant PCG method is presented. The method applies only two inner products to reliably detect errors. In case of errors, the method automatically selects between roll-back and efficient on-line correction. This significantly reduces the error detection overhead and expensive re-computations.

Modern very large scale integration designs incorporate a high amount of instrumentation that supports post-silicon validation and debug, volume test and diagnosis, as well as in-field system monitoring and maintenance. Reconfigurable scan architectures, as allowed by the novel IEEE Std 1149.1-2013 (JTAG) and IEEE Std 1687-2014 [Internal JTAG (IJTAG)], emerge as a scalable mechanism for access to such on-chip instruments. While the on-chip instrumentation is crucial for meeting quality, dependability, and time-to-market goals, it is prone to abuse and threatens system safety and security. A secure access management method is mandatory to assure that critical instruments be accessible to authorized entities only. This paper presents a novel protection method for fine-grained access management in complex reconfigurable scan networks based on a challenge-response authentication protocol. The target scan network is extended with an authorization instrument and secure segment insertion bits that together control the accessibility of individual instruments. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first fine-grained access management scheme that scales well with the number of protected instruments and offers a high level of security. Compared with recent state-of-the-art techniques, this scheme is more favorable with respect to implementation cost, performance overhead, and provided security level.

Unknown (X) values emerge during the design process as well as during system operation and test application. X-sources are for instance black boxes in design models, clock-domain boundaries, analog-to-digital converters, or uncontrolled or uninitialized sequential elements. To compute a test pattern for a given fault, well-defined logic values are required both for fault activation and propagation to observing outputs. In presence of X-values, conventional test generation algorithms, based on structural algorithms, Boolean satisfiability (SAT), or binary decision diagram-based reasoning may fail to generate test patterns or to prove faults untestable. This paper proposes the first efficient stuck-at and transition-delay fault test generation algorithm able to prove testability or untestability of faults in presence of X-values. It overcomes the principal pessimism of conventional algorithms when X-values are considered by mapping the test generation problem to the SAT of quantified Boolean formulas. Experiments on ISCAS benchmarks and larger industrial circuits investigate the increase in fault coverage for conventional deterministic and potential detection requirements for both randomized and clustered X-sources.

Efficient access to on-chip instrumentation is a key requirement for post-silicon validation, test, debug, bringup, and diagnosis. Reconfigurable scan networks, as proposed by, for example, IEEE Std 1687-2014 and IEEE Std 1149.1-2013, emerge as an effective and affordable means to cope with the increasing complexity of on-chip infrastructure. Reconfigurable scan networks are often hierarchical and may have complex structural and functional dependencies. Common approaches for scan verification based on static structural analysis and functional simulation are not sufficient to ensure correct operation of these types of architectures. To access an instrument in a reconfigurable scan network, a scan-in bit sequence must be generated according to the current state and structure of the network. Due to sequential and combinational dependencies, the access pattern generation process ( pattern retargeting ) poses a complex decision and optimization problem. This article presents the first generalized formal model that considers structural and functional dependencies of reconfigurable scan networks and is directly applicable to 1687-2014-based and 1149.1-2013-based scan architectures. This model enables efficient formal verification of complex scan networks, as well as automatic generation of access patterns. The proposed pattern generation method supports concurrent access to multiple target scan registers ( access merging ) and generates short scan-in sequences.

Soft errors are a reliability threat for reconfigurable systems implemented with SRAM-based FPGAs. They can be handled through fault tolerance techniques like scrubbing and modular redundancy. However, selecting these techniques statically at design or compile time tends to be pessimistic and prohibits optimal adaptation to changing soft error rate at runtime.

This paper introduces a hybrid method to synthesize area-efficient fault-secure NoC switches to detect all errors resulting from any single-point combinational or transition fault in switches and interconnect links. Firstly, the structural faults that are always detectable by data encoding at flit-level are identified. Next, the fault-secure structure is constructed with minimized area such that errors caused by the remaining faults are detected under any given input vector. The experimental evaluation shows significant area savings compared to conventional fault-secure schemes. In addition, the resulting structure can be reused for test compaction. This reduces the amount of test response data and test time without loss of fault coverage or diagnostic resolution.

Test generation algorithms based on standard n-valued logic algebras are pessimistic in presence of unknown (X) values, overestimate the number of signals with X-values and underestimate fault coverage.

Small delay faults may be an indicator of a reliability threat, even if they do not affect the system functionality yet. In recent years, Faster-than-at-Speed-Test (FAST) has become a feasible method to detect faults, which are hidden by the timing slack or by long critical paths in the combinational logic. FAST poses severe challenges to the automatic test equipment with respect to timing, performance, and resolution. In this paper, it is shown how logic built-in self-test (BIST) or embedded deterministic test can be used for an efficient FAST application. Running BIST just at a higher frequency is not an option, as outputs of long paths will receive undefined values due to set time violations and destroy the content of the signature registers. Instead, for a given test pattern sequence, faults are classified according to the optimal detection frequency. For each class, a MISR-based compaction scheme is adapted, such that the critical bits to be observed can be determined by algebraic computations. Experiments show that rather a small number of inter-mediate signatures have to be evaluated to observe a large fraction of hidden delay faults testable by the given test sequence.

Logic and fault simulation are essential techniques in electronic design automation. The accuracy of standard simulation algorithms is compromised by unknown or X-values. This results in a pessimistic overestimation of X-valued signals in the circuit and a pessimistic underestimation of fault coverage. This work proposes efficient algorithms for combinational and sequential logic as well as for stuck-at and transition-delay fault simulation that are free of any simulation pessimism in presence of unknowns. The SAT-based algorithms exactly classifiy all signal states. During fault simulation, each fault is accurately classified as either undetected, definitely detected, or possibly detected. The pessimism with respect to unknowns present in classic algorithms is thoroughly investigated in the experimental results on benchmark circuits. The applicability of the proposed algorithms is demonstrated on larger industrial circuits. The results show that, by accurate analysis, the number of detected faults can be significantly increased without increasing the test-set size.

The accessibility of on-chip embedded infrastructure for test, reconfiguration, and debug poses a serious safety and security problem. Special care is required in the design and development of scan architectures based on IEEE Std. 1149.1 (JTAG), IEEE Std. 1500, and especially reconfigurable scan networks, as allowed by the upcoming IEEE P1687 (IJTAG). Traditionally, the scan infrastructure is secured after manufacturing test using fuses that disable the test access port (TAP) completely or partially. The fuse-based approach is efficient if some scan chains or instructions of the TAP controller are to be permanently blocked. However, this approach becomes costly if fine-grained access management is required, and it faces scalability issues in reconfigurable scan networks. In this paper, we propose a scalable solution for multi-level access management in reconfigurable scan networks. The access to protected registers is restricted locally at TAP-level by a sequence filter which allows only a precomputed set of scan-in access sequences. Our approach does not require any modification of the scan architecture and causes no access time penalty. Experimental results for complex reconfigurable scan networks show that the area overhead depends primarily on the number of allowed accesses, and is marginal even if this number exceeds the count of network's registers.

Unknown (X) values in a circuit impair test quality and increase test costs. Classical n-valued algorithms for fault simulation and ATPG, which typically use a three- or four-valued logic for the good and faulty circuit, are in principle pessimistic in presence of X-values and cannot accurately compute the achievable fault coverage. In partial scan or pipelined circuits, X-values originate in non-scan flip-flops. These circuits are tested using multi-cycle tests. Here we present multi-cycle test generation techniques for circuits with X-values due to partial scan or other X-sources. The proposed techniques have been integrated into a multi-cycle ATPG framework which employs formal Boolean and quantified Boolean (QBF) satisfiability techniques to compute the possible signal states in the circuit accurately. Efficient encoding of the problem instance ensures reasonable runtimes. We show that in presence of X-values, the detection of stuck-at faults requires not only exact formal reasoning in a single cycle, but especially the consideration of multiple cycles for excitation of the fault site as well as propagation and controlled reconvergence of fault effects. For the first time, accurate deterministic ATPG for multi-cycle test application is supported for stuck-at faults. Experiments on ISCAS'89 and industrial circuits with X-sources show that this new approach increases the fault coverage considerably.

Unknown (X) values may emerge during the design process as well as during system operation and test application. Sources of X-values are for example black boxes, clock-domain boundaries, analog-to-digital converters, or uncontrolled or uninitialized sequential elements.

Efficient access to on-chip instrumentation is a key enabler for post-silicon validation, debug, bringup or diagnosis. Reconfigurable scan networks, as proposed by e.g. the IEEE Std. P1687, emerge as an effective and affordable means to cope with the increasing complexity of on-chip infrastructure. To access an element in a reconfigurable scan network, a scan-in bit sequence must be generated according to the current state and structure of the network. Due to sequential and combinational dependencies, the scan pattern generation process (pattern retargeting) poses a complex decision and optimization problem. This work presents a method for scan pattern generation with reduced access time. We map the access time reduction to a pseudo-Boolean optimization problem, which enables the use of efficient solvers to exhaustively explore the search space of valid scan-in sequences. This is the first automated method for efficient pattern retargeting in complex reconfigurable scan architectures such as P1687-based networks. It supports the concurrent access to multiple target scan registers (access merging) and generates reduced (short) scan-in sequences, considering all sequential and combinational dependencies. The proposed method achieves an access time reduction by up to 88× or 2.4× in average w.r.t. unoptimized satisfying solutions.

Runtime reconfigurable architectures based on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are attractive for realizing complex applications. However, being manufactured in latest semiconductor process technologies, FPGAs are increasingly prone to aging effects, which reduce the reliability of such systems and must be tackled by aging mitigation and application of fault tolerance techniques. This paper presents module diversification, a novel design method that creates different configurations for runtime reconfigurable modules. Our method provides fault tolerance by creating the minimal number of configurations such that for any faulty Configurable Logic Block (CLB) there is at least one configuration that does not use that CLB. Additionally, we determine the fraction of time that each configuration should be used to balance the stress and to mitigate the aging process in FPGA-based runtime reconfigurable systems. The generated configurations significantly improve reliability by fault-tolerance and aging mitigation.

Field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based reconfigurable systems allow the online adaptation to dynamically changing runtime requirements. The reliability of FPGAs, being manufactured in latest technologies, is threatened by soft errors, as well as aging effects and latent defects. To ensure reliable reconfiguration, it is mandatory to guarantee the correct operation of the reconfigurable fabric. This can be achieved by periodic or on-demand online testing. This paper presents a reliable system architecture for runtime-reconfigurable systems, which integrates two nonconcurrent online test strategies: preconfiguration online tests (PRET) and postconfiguration online tests (PORT). The PRET checks that the reconfigurable hardware is free of faults by periodic or on-demand tests. The PORT has two objectives: It tests reconfigured hardware units after reconfiguration to check that the configuration process completed correctly and it validates the expected functionality. During operation, PORT is used to periodically check the reconfigured hardware units for malfunctions in the programmable logic. Altogether, this paper presents PRET, PORT, and the system integration of such test schemes into a runtime-reconfigurable system, including the resource management and test scheduling. Experimental results show that the integration of online testing in reconfigurable systems incurs only minimum impact on performance while delivering high fault coverage and low test latency.

Fault simulation is an essential tool in electronic design automation. The accuracy of the computation of fault coverage in classic n-valued simulation algorithms is compromised by unknown (X) values. This results in a pessimistic underestimation of the coverage, and overestimation of unknown (X) values at the primary and pseudo-primary outputs. This work proposes the first stuck-at fault simulation algorithm free of any simulation pessimism in presence of unknowns. The SAT-based algorithm exactly classifies any fault and distinguishes between definite and possible detects. The pessimism w.r.t. unknowns present in classic algorithms is discussed in the experimental results on ISCAS benchmark and industrial circuits. The applicability of our algorithm to large industrial circuits is demonstrated.

FPGA-based reconfigurable systems allow the online adaptation to dynamically changing runtime requirements. However, the reliability of modern FPGAs is threatened by latent defects and aging effects. Hence, it is mandatory to ensure the reliable operation of the FPGA's reconfigurable fabric. This can be achieved by periodic or on-demand online testing. In this paper, a system-integrated, transparent structural online test method for runtime reconfigurable systems is proposed. The required tests are scheduled like functional workloads, and thorough optimizations of the test overhead reduce the performance impact. The proposed scheme has been implemented on a reconfigurable system. The results demonstrate that thorough testing of the reconfigurable fabric can be achieved at negligible performance impact on the application.

Reconfigurable scan architectures allow flexible integration and efficient access to infrastructure in SoCs, e.g. for test, diagnosis, repair or debug. Such scan networks are often hierarchical and have complex structural and functional dependencies. For instance, the IEEE P1687 proposal, known as IJTAG, allows integration of multiplexed scan networks with arbitrary internal control signals. Common approaches for scan verification based on static structural analysis and functional simulation are not sufficient to ensure correct operation of these types of architectures. Hierarchy and flexibility may result in complex or even contradicting configuration requirements to access single elements. Sequential logic justification is therefore mandatory both to verify the validity of a scan network, and to generate the required access sequences. This work presents a formal method for verification of reconfigurable scan architectures, as well as pattern retargeting, i.e. generation of required scan-in data. The method is based on a formal model of structural and functional dependencies. Network verification and pattern retargeting is mapped to a Boolean satisfiability problem, which enables the use of efficient SAT solvers to exhaustively explore the search space of valid scan configurations.

Unknown or X-values during test applications may originate from uncontrolled sequential cells or macros, from clock or A/D boundaries, or from tristate logic. The exact identification of X-value propagation paths in logic circuits is crucial in logic simulation and fault simulation. In the first case, it enables the proper assessment of expected responses and the effective and efficient handling of X-values during test response compaction. In the second case, it is important for a proper assessment of fault coverage of a given test set and consequently influences the efficiency of test pattern generation. The commonly employedn-valued logic simulation evaluates the propagation of X-values only pessimistically, i.e., the X-propagation paths found byn-valued logic simulation are a superset of the actual propagation paths. This paper presents an efficient method for overcoming this pessimism and for determining accurately the set of signals that carry an X-value for an input pattern. As examples, it investigates the influence of this pessimism on the two applications, X-masking and stuck-at fault coverage assessment. The experimental results on benchmark and industrial circuits assess the pessimism of classic algorithms and show that these algorithms significantly overestimate the signals with X-values. The experiments show that overmasking of test data during test compression can be reduced by an accurate analysis. In stuck-at fault simulation, the coverage of the test set is increased by the proposed algorithm without incurring any overhead.

Unknown (X) values, originating from memories, clock domain boundaries or A/D interfaces, may compromise test signatures and fault coverage. Classical logic and fault simulation algorithms are pessimistic w.r.t. the propagation of X values in the circuit. This work proposes efficient hybrid logic and stuck-at fault simulation algorithms which combine heuristics and local BDDs to increase simulation accuracy. Experimental results on benchmark and large industrial circuits show significantly increased fault coverage and low runtime. The achieved simulation precision is quantified for the first time.

Fault simulation of digital circuits must correctly compute fault coverage to assess test and product quality. In case of unknown values (X-values), fault simulation is pessimistic and underestimates actual fault coverage, resulting in increased test time and data volume, as well as higher overhead for design-for-test. This work proposes a novel algorithm to determine fault coverage with significantly increased accuracy, offering increased fault coverage at no cost, or the reduction of test costs for the targeted coverage. The algorithm is compared to related work and evaluated on benchmark and industrial circuits.

High power consumption in scan testing can cause undue yield loss which has increasingly become a serious problem for deep-submicron VLSI circuits. Growing evidence attributes this problem to shift timing failures, which are primarily caused by excessive switching activity in the proximities of clock paths that tends to introduce severe clock skew due to IR-drop-induced delay increase. This paper is the first of its kind to address this critical issue with a novel layout-aware scheme based on scan segmentation design, called LCTI-SS (Low-Clock-Tree-Impact Scan Segmentation). An optimal combination of scan segments is identified for simultaneous clocking so that the switching activity in the proximities of clock trees is reduced while maintaining the average power reduction effect on conventional scan segmentation. Experimental results on benchmark and industrial circuits have demonstrated the advantage of the LCTI-SS scheme.

At-speed scan testing may suffer from severe yield loss due to the launch safety problem, where test responses are invalidated by excessive launch switching activity (LSA) caused by test stimulus launching in the at-speed test cycle. However, previous low-power test generation techniques can only reduce LSA to some extent but cannot guarantee launch safety. This paper proposes a novel & practical power-aware test generation flow, featuring guaranteed launch safety. The basic idea is to enhance ATPG with a unique two-phase (rescue & mask) scheme by targeting at the real cause of the launch safety problem, i.e., the excessive LSA in the neighboring areas (namely impact areas) around long paths sensitized by a test vector. The rescue phase is to reduce excessive LSA in impact areas in a focused manner, and the mask phase is to exclude from use in fault detection the uncertain test response at the endpoint of any long sensitized path that still has excessive LSA in its impact area even after the rescue phase is executed. This scheme is the first of its kind for achieving guaranteed launch safety with minimal impact on test quality and test costs, which is the ultimate goal of power-aware at-speed scan test generation.

Embedded testing, built-in self-test and methods for test compression rely on efficient test response compaction. Often, a circuit under test contains sources of unknown values (X), uninitialized memories for instance. These X values propagate through the circuit and may spoil the response signatures. The standard way to overcome this problem is X-masking. Outputs which carry an X value are usually determined by logic simulation. In this paper, we show that the amount of Xs is significantly overestimated, and in consequence outputs are over masked, too. An efficient way for the exact computation of output Xs is presented for the first time. The resulting X-masking promises significant gains with respect to test time, test volume and fault coverage.

In recent technology nodes, reliability is considered a part of the standard design ¿ow at all levels of embedded system design. While techniques that use only low-level models at gate- and register transfer-level offer high accuracy, they are too inefficient to consider the overall application of the embedded system. Multi-level models with high abstraction are essential to efficiently evaluate the impact of physical defects on the system. This paper provides a methodology that leverages state-of-the-art techniques for efficient fault simulation of structural faults together with transaction-level modeling. This way it is possible to accurately evaluate the impact of the faults on the entire hardware/software system. A case study of a system consisting of hardware and software for image compression and data encryption is presented and the method is compared to a standard gate/RT mixed-level approach.

Fault simulation is essential in test generation, design for test and reliability assessment of integrated circuits. Reliability analysis and the simulation of self-test structures are particularly computationally expensive as a large number of patterns has to be evaluated.

This paper provides a methodology that leverages state-of-the-art techniques for efficient fault simulation of structural faults together with transaction level modeling. This way it is possible to accurately evaluate the impact of the faults on the entire hardware/software system.

The complexity of the test infrastructure and test strategies in systems-on-chip approaches the complexity of the functional design space. This paper presents test design space exploration and validation of test strategies and schedules using transaction level models (TLMs). Since many aspects of testing involve the transfer of a significant amount of test stimuli and responses, the communication-centric view of TLMs suits this purpose exceptionally well.

Optimizing bandwidth by compression and compaction always has to solve the trade-off between input bandwidth reduction and output bandwidth reduction. Recently it has been shown that splitting scan chains into shorter segments and compacting the shift data outputs into a singleparity bit reduces the test response data to one bit per cycle without affecting fault coverage and diagnostic resolution if the compactor's structure is included into the ATPG process.This test data reduction at the output side comes with challenges at the input side. The bandwidth requirement grows due to the increased number of chains and due to a drastically decreased amount of don't care values in the test patterns. The paper at hand presents a new iterative approach to test set encoding which optimizes bandwidth on both input and output side while keeping the diagnostic resolution and fault coverage. Experiments with industrial designs demonstrate that test application time, test data volume and diagnostic resolution are improved at the same time and for most designs testing with a bandwidth of three bits per cycle is possible.

Structural on-line self-test may be performed to detect permanent faults and avoid their accumulation. This paper improves concurrent BIST techniques based on a deterministic test set. Here, the test patterns are specially generated with a small number of specified bits. This results in very low test latency, which reduces the likelihood of fault accumulation. Experiments with a large number of circuits show that the hardware overhead is significantly lower than the overhead for previously published methods. Furthermore, the method allows to tradeoff fault coverage, test latency and hardware overhead.