ACCESS

Current nanometer CMOS circuits show an increasing sensitivity to deviations in first-order parameters and suffer from process variations during manufacturing. To properly assess and support test validation of digital designs, low-level fault simulation approaches are utilized to accurately capture the behavior of CMOS cells under parametric faults and process variations as early as possible throughout the design phase. However, low-level simulation approaches exhibit a high computational complexity, especially when variation has to be taken into account. In this work a high-throughput parallel fault simulation at switch level is presented. First-order electrical parameters are utilized to capture CMOS-specific functional and timing behavior of complex cells allowing to model faults with transistor granularity and without the need of logic abstraction. Furthermore, variation modeling in cells and transistor devices enables broad and efficient variation analyses of faults over many circuit instances for the first time. The simulation approach utilizes massive parallelization on Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) by exploiting parallelism from cells, stimuli, faults and circuit instances. Despite the lower abstraction levels of the approach, it processes designs with millions of gates and outperforms conventional fault simulation at logic level in terms of speed and accuracy.

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.

Self-awareness allows autonomous systems the dynamic adaptation to changing states of the hardware platform and the optimal usage of available computing resources. This demands concurrent, periodical, or on-demand monitoring and testing of the hardware structures to detect and classify deviations from the nominal behavior and appropriate reactions. This survey discusses suitable self-test, self-checking, and self-diagnosis methods for the realization of self-awareness and presents two case studies in which such methods are applied at different levels.

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.

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.

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.

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. Over 97% of the 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.

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.

Today's MPSOCs employ complex on-chip infrastructure and instrumentation for efficient test, debug, diagnosis, and post-silicon validation, reliability management and maintenance in the field, or monitoring and calibration during operation. To enable flexible and efficient access to such instrumentation, reconfigurable scan networks (RSNs) as recently standardized by IEEE Std 1687 can be used. Given the importance of infrastructure for the dependability of the whole MPSOC, however, the RSN itself must be highly dependable. This paper addresses dependability issues of RSNs including verification, test, and security, and their importance for dependable MPSOCs. First research results are summarized, and open questions for future work are highlighted.

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, clockdomain 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 BDD-based reasoning may fail to generate test patterns or to prove faults untestable. This work proposes the first efficient stuck-at and transitiondelay 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 satisfiability of Quantified Boolean Formulae (QBF). 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.

Modern VLSI 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 (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 work 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 (S²IB) 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 stateof- the-art techniques, this scheme is more favorable with respect to implementation cost, performance overhead, and provided security level.

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 e.g. IEEE P1687 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 P1687-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.

Scan infrastructures based on IEEE Std. 1149.1 (JTAG), 1500 (SECT), and P1687 (IJTAG) provide a cost-effective access mechanism for test, reconfiguration, and debugging purposes. The improved accessibility of on-chip instruments, however, poses a serious threat to system safety and security. While state-of-theart protection methods for scan architectures compliant with JTAG and SECT are very effective, most of these techniques face scalability issues in reconfigurable scan networks allowed by the upcoming IJTAG standard. This paper describes a scalable solution for multilevel access management in reconfigurable scan networks. The access to protected instruments is restricted locally at the interface to the network. The access restriction is realized by a sequence filter that allows only a precomputed set of scan-in access sequences. This approach does not require any modification of the scan architecture and causes no access time penalty. Therefore, it is well suited for core-based designs with hard macros and 3D integrated circuits. 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 registers in the network.

This survey introduces into the common practices, current challenges and advanced techniques of high quality system level test and diagnosis. Specialized techniques and industrial standards of testing complex boards are introduced. The reuse for system test of design for test structures and test data developed at chip level is discussed, including the limitations and research challenges. Structural test methods have to be complemented by functional test methods. State-of-the-art and leading edge research for functional testing will be covered.