Efficient Embedding of Deterministic Test Data

Systems with many integrated circuits (ICs), often of the same type, are increasingly common to meet the constant performance demand. However, systems in recent semiconductor technologies require not only manufacturing test, but also in-field test. Preferably, the same test set is utilized both at manufacturing test and in-field test. While deterministic test patterns provide high fault coverage, storing complete test vectors leads to huge memory requirements and inflexibility in applying tests. In an IEEE 1149.1 (Boundary scan) environment, this paper presents an approach to efficiently embed deterministic test patterns in the system by taking structural information of the system into account. Instead of storing complete test vectors, the approach stores only commands and component-specific test sets per each unique component. Given a command, test vectors are created by a test controller during test application. The approach is validated on hardware and experiments on ITC'02 benchmarks and industrial circuits show that the memory requirement for storing the test data for a system is highly related to the number of unique components.