Power and Thermal Constrained Test Scheduling Under Deep Submicron Technologies

Conventional power constrained test scheduling methods do not guarantee a thermal-safe solution. In this paper, we propose a test scheduling algorithm that satisfies the resource, power, and thermal constraints. First, in contrast to existing schemes, the proposed algorithm exploits superposition principle to perform fast and accurate thermal simulation, which, in turn, allows the algorithm to search for solutions which introduce cooling periods between tests to reduce the overall test length. Second, we propose a test partition-based method to further improve the performance of the test scheduling. We apply our test scheduling algorithm to ITC'02 SoC benchmarks and the results show considerable improvement in the total test length over existing methods.