Test Scheduling for Wafer-Level Test-During-Burn-In of Core-Based SoCs

Wafer-level test during burn-in (WLTBI) has recently emerged as a promising technique to reduce test and burn-in costs in semiconductor manufacturing. However, the testing of multiple cores of a system-on-chip (SoC) in parallel during WLTBI leads to constantly-varying device power during the duration of the test. This power variation adversely affects predictions of temperature and the time required for burn-in. We present a test-scheduling technique for WLTBI of core-based SoCs, where the primary objective is to minimize the variation in power consumption during test. A secondary objective is to minimize the test application time. Simulation results are presented for two ITC'02 SoC benchmarks, and the proposed technique is compared with two baseline methods.