• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.56 no.5
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• pp.980-986
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• 2007

Boundary scan test structure(JTAG IEEE 1149.1 standard) that supports an internal scan chain is generally being used to test CUT(circuit under test). Since the internal scan chain can only have a single scan-in port and a single scan-out port; however, existing boundary test methods can not be used when multiple scan chains are present in CUT. Those chains must be stitched to form a single scan chain as shown in this paper. We propose an efficient boundary scan test structure that adds a circuit called Clock Group Register(CGR) for multiple clocks testing within the design of multiple scan chains. The proposed CGR has the function of grouping clocks. By adding CGR to a previously existing boundary scan design, the design is modified. This revised scan design overcomes the limitation of supporting a single scan-in port and out port, and it bolsters multiple scan-in ports and out ports. Through our experiments, the effectiveness of CGR is proved. With this, it is possible to test more complicated designs that have high density with a little effort. Furthermore, it will also benefit in designing those complicated circuits.

• Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.130-134
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• 2008

The increasing size of very large scale integration (VLSI) circuits, high transistor density, and popularity of low-power circuit and system design are making the minimization of power dissipation an important issue in VLSI design. Test Power dissipation is exceedingly high in scan based environments wherein scan chain transitions during the shift of test data further reflect into significant levels of circuit switching unnecessarily. Scan chain or cell modification lead to reduced dissipations of power. The ETC algorithm of previous work has weak points. Taking all of this into account, we therefore propose a new algorithm. Its name is RE_ETC. The proposed modifications in the scan chain consist of Exclusive-OR gate insertion and scan cell reordering, leading to significant power reductions with absolutely no area or performance penalty whatsoever. Experimental results confirm the considerable reductions in scan chain transitions. We show that modified scan cell has the improvement of test efficiency and power dissipations.

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.16 no.5
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• pp.582-594
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• 2016

Various test data compression techniques have been developed to reduce the test costs of system-on-a-chips. In this paper, a scan chain reordering algorithm for code-based test data compression techniques is proposed. Scan cells within an acceptable relocation distance are ranked to reduce the number of conflicts in all test patterns and rearranged by a positioning algorithm to minimize the routing overhead. The proposed method is demonstrated on ISCAS '89 benchmark circuits with their physical layout by using a 180 nm CMOS process library. Significant improvements are observed in compression ratio and test power consumption with minor routing overhead.

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.221-228
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• 2007

In this paper, we propose a new symbolic simulation for scan chain diagnosis to solve the diagnosis resolution problem. The proposed scan chain fault simulation, called the SF-simulation, is able to analyze the effects caused by faulty scan cells in good scan chains. A new scan chain fault simulation is performed with a modified logic ATPG pattern. In this simulation, we consider the effect of errors caused by scan shifting in the faulty scan chain. Therefore, for scan chain diagnosis, we use the faulty information in good scan chains which are not contaminated by the faults while unloading scan out responses. The SF-simulation can tighten the size of the candidate list and achieve a high diagnosis resolution by analyzing fault effects of good scan chains, which are ignored by most previous works. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.52 no.6
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• pp.70-76
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• 2015

This paper introduces an FPGA self-test architecture reusing FPGA boundary scan chain as self-test circuits. An FPGA boundary scan cell is two or three times bigger than a normal boundary scan cell because it is used for configuring the function of input/output pins functions as well as testing and debugging. Accordingly, we analyze the architecture of an FPGA boundary scan cell in detail and design a set of built-in self-test (BIST) circuits in which FPGA boundary scan chain and a small amount of FPGA logic elements. By reusing FPGA boundary scan chain for self-test, we can reduce area overhead and perform a processor based on-board FPGA testing/monitoring. Experimental results show the area overhead comparison and simulation results.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.30 no.3
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• pp.412-420
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• 2008

A new scan partition architecture to reduce both the average and peak power dissipation during scan testing is proposed for low-power embedded systems. In scan-based testing, due to the extremely high switching activity during the scan shift operation, the power consumption increases considerably. In addition, the reduced correlation between consecutive test patterns may increase the power consumed during the capture cycle. In the proposed architecture, only a subset of scan cells is loaded with test stimulus and captured with test responses by freezing the remaining scan cells according to the spectrum of unspecified bits in the test cubes. To optimize the proposed process, a novel graph-based heuristic to partition the scan chain into several segments and a technique to increase the number of don't cares in the given test set have been developed. Experimental results on large ISCAS89 benchmark circuits show that the proposed technique, compared to the traditional full scan scheme, can reduce both the average switching activities and the average peak switching activities by 92.37% and 41.21%, respectively.

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.124-130
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• 2014

In highly reliable and durable systems, failures due to aging might result in catastrophes. Aging monitoring techniques to prevent catastrophes by predicting such a failure are required. This paper presents a scan-based on-line aging monitoring scheme which monitors aging during normal operation and gives an alarm if aging is detected so that the system users take action before a failure occurs. We illustrate our modified scan chain architecture and aging monitoring control method. Experimental results show our simulation results to verify the functions of the proposed scheme.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.201-206
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• 2007

In this paper, we propose the efficient low power test methodology of NoC(Network-on chip) for the test of core-based systems that use this platform. To reduce the power consumption of transferring data through router channel, the scan vectors are partitioned into flits by channel width. The don't cares in unspecified scan vectors are mapped to binary values to minimize the switching rate between flits. Experimental results for full-scanned versions of ISCAS 89 benchmark circuits show that the proposed method leads to about 35% reduction in test power.

• The Transactions of the Korea Information Processing Society
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• v.7 no.10
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• pp.3226-3235
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• 2000

The more complex and larger semiconductor integraed circuits become, the core important delay test becomes which guarantees that semiconductor integrated circuits operate in time. In this paper, we propose a new partial enhanced scan method that can generate test patterns for path delay faults offectively. We implemented a new partial enhanced scan method based on an automatic test pattern generator(ATPG) which uses implication and justification . First. we generate test patterns in the standard scan environment. And if test patterns are not generated regularly in the scan chain, we determine flip-flops which applied enhanced scan flip-flops using the information derived for running an automatic test pattern generator inthe circuti. Determming enhanced scan flip-flops are based on a fault coverage or a hardware overhead. through the expenment for JSCAS 89 benchmark sequential circuits, we compared the fault coverage in the standard scan enviroment and enhance scan environment, partial enhanced scan environment. And we proved the effectiveness of the new partial enhanced scan method by identifying a high fault coverage.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.42 no.12
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• pp.79-90
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• 2005

In this paper, we propose a new clustered reconfigurable interconnect network (CRIN) BIST to improve the embedding probabilities of random-pattern-resistant-patterns. The proposed method uses a scan-cell reordering technique based on the signal probabilities of given test cubes and specific hardware blocks that increases the embedding probabilities of care bit clustered scan chain test cubes. We have developed a simulated annealing based algorithm that maximizes the embedding probabilities of scan chain test cubes to reorder scan cells, and an iterative algorithm for synthesizing the CRIN hardware. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed CRIN BIST technique achieves complete fault coverage with lower storage requirement and shorter testing time in comparison with the conventional methods.