The IEEE European Test Symposium (ETS) has been facilitating progress in electronic systems testing since its launch in 1996. On the occasion of its 30th anniversary, this collaborative paper gathers sections by 21 ETS teams to outline their influential ideas and milestones. Each team’s section highlights historical perspective, current research, frameworks and projects as well as forward-looking research agendas in the area of electronic-based circuits and systems testing, reliability, safety, security and validation. This anniversary summary documents how research of various ETS teams, exemplifying the test community, has been evolving and transitioning from concepts to practical standards and Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools and flows. This legacy is a strong base to drive the next generation of advances in electronic systems testing.

Current and future multicore architectures can significantly accelerate the performance of test automation procedures depending on the underlying architecture and the scalability of their algorithms. This paper proposes a new parallel methodology targeting the fault simulation problem, for shared memory multicore systems, that maintains scalability with the increase of the number of cores. The method is based on a simple single thread process that allows focusing on the optimization of the parallelization process in different dimensions. Additionally, a number of optimizations are incorporated in the approach to control fault dropping and to avoid unnecessary work. The reported experimental results, for both random and deterministic test sets, demonstrate the scalability of the method. As the number of cores increases, the reported speed-up increases proportionally, where comparable recent methods report saturation or even reduction of the obtained speed-up.

Negative Bias Temperature Instability (NBTI) is a prominent physical failure mechanism which severely degrades the performance of PMOS transistors whenever the voltage at the gate is negatively biased. It leads to catastrophic timing violations in critical circuits and a severe shortening of the overall operational lifetime of the entire system. To alleviate such damaging effects due to NBTI, we present PRITEXT, a novel technique which generates a minimal set of deterministic exercise vectors based on test generation techniques which inherently near-optimizes the bit patterns across each of the generated vectors; the end target being to exercise the critical paths of a device when dormant so as to achieve near-ideal NBTI stress reduction. We explore the design-space of our generated vectors and apply them to our test processor platform under differing sequences, where our evaluation under realistic benchmarks shows that PRITEXT leads to an average 4.99× and a maximum of 13.91× lifetime improvement using 9 generated vectors. In an attempt to reduce hardware overheads even further, we next propose a heuristic to further reduce the number of exercise vectors with minimum loss in lifetime improvement.

A new test generation methodology is proposed that takes advantage of shared memory multi-core systems. Appropriate parallelization of the main steps of ATPG allocates resources in order to minimize workload duplication and multi-threading race contention, often encountered in parallel implementations. The proposed approach ensures that the obtained acceleration grows linearly with the number of processing cores and, at the same time, keeps the test set size close to that obtained by serial ATPG. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed methodology achieves higher degree of speed-up than comparable state-of-the-art multi-core based tools, while maintains similar test set sizes.

Multicore architectures can significantly accelerate the performance of well-established design and test automation processes, provided that the underlying process is scalable with respect to the system on which it is executed. In this work we concentrate on fault simulation and propose a new parallel process for shared-memory multicore systems, capable of maintaining its scalability as the number of processing cores utilized increases. In order to maximize parallelization, the method utilizes a simple, non-optimized single thread simulation process, which allows for high degrees of freedom to be exploited by three different and combined dimensions of parallelism. Simulation data is distributed to the available cores in a balanced fashion in order to favor speed-up over single-core executions and, ultimately, scalability. The experimental results show that the proposed approach achieves high speed-up rates which, in contrast to comparable state-of the-art methods, increase monotonically with the number of cores demonstrating a highly scalable solution.

Moore's Law scaling continues to yield higher transistor density with each succeeding process generation, leading to today's many-core chip multiprocessors (CMPs) with tens or even hundreds of interconnected cores or tiles. Unfortunately, deep submicron CMOS process technology is marred by increasing susceptibility to wear. Prolonged operational stress gives rise to accelerated wearout and failure due to several physical failure mechanisms, including hot-carrier injection (HCI) and negative-bias temperature instability (NBTI). Each failure mechanism correlates with different usage-based stresses, all of which can eventually generate permanent faults. While the wearout of an individual core in many-core CMPs may not necessarily be catastrophic, a single fault in the interprocessor network-on-chip (NoC) fabric could render the entire chip useless, as it could lead to protocol-level deadlocks, or even partition away vital components such as the memory controller or other critical I/O. In this article, we study HCI- and NBTI-induced wear due to actual stresses caused by real workloads, applied onto the interconnect microarchitecture and develop a critical path model for NBTI-induced wearout. A key finding of this modeling is that, counter to prevailing wisdom, wearout in the CMP's on-chip interconnect is correlated with lack of load observed in the NoC routers rather than high load. We then develop a novel wearout-decelerating scheme in which routers under low load have their wear-sensitive components exercised without significantly impacting cycle time, pipeline depth, area, or power consumption of the overall router. A novel deterministic approach is proposed for the generation of appropriate exercise-mode data, ensuring design parameter targets are met. We subsequently show that the proposed design yields an ∼2,300× decrease in the rate of wear.

Stereo Vision, a technique aimed at inferring depth information from stereo images, has been used in a wide range of computer vision applications, with real-time requirements in emerging embedded vision systems. Computation of the disparity map, a vital step in extracting depth information from stereo images, requires a significant amount of computational resources. As such, existing software implementations require high-end hardware platforms to achieve real-time frame rates, suggesting that dedicated hardware mechanisms might be more suitable for embedded applications. In this paper, we present a disparity map computation architecture targeting embedded stereo vision applications with hard real-time requirements. The architecture integrates a hardware edge detection mechanism that reduces the search space, improving the overall performance, and is configurable in terms of various application parameters, making it suitable for a number of application environments. The paper also presents a study on the impact of the various parameters in terms of the performance and hardware/power overheads. An experimental prototype of the architecture was implemented on the Xilinx ML505 FPGA Evaluation Platform, achieving 50 Frames Per Second (fps) for 1,280 × 1,024 image sizes. Moreover, the quality of the disparity maps generated by the proposed system is comparable to other existing hardware implementations featuring local stereo correspondence methods.

Stereoscopic 3D reconstruction is an important algorithm in the field of Computer Vision, with a variety of applications in embedded and real-time systems. Existing software-based implementations cannot satisfy the performance requirements for such constrained systems; hence an embedded hardware mechanism might be more suitable. In this paper, we present an architecture of a 3D reconstruction system for stereoscopic images, which we implement on Virtex2 Pro FPGA. The architecture uses a Sobel edge detector to achieve real-time (75 fps) performance, and is configurable in terms of various application parameters, making it suitable for a number of application environments. The paper also presents a design exploration on algorithmic parameters such as disparity range, correlation window size, and input image size, illustrating the impact on the performance for each parameter.