Solving the SOC test scheduling problem based on time-divided of IP test

Long test application time is an important problem in system-on-a-chip (SOC) design, and test scheduling is the main way to solve this problem. It is equivalent to the NP-complete 2-D bin-packing problem, each core test is represented by a rectangle with height equal to the TAM width and width equal to the test time. In this paper, we present a time-divided of IP test to solve SOC test scheduling problems. The main idea of the solution is to test the IP into several time periods, which makes the solution more flexible. Meanwhile, we use cross-entropy method and B*-Tree based floor planning technique to solve the test scheduling problem. Experimental results on ITC'02 SOC test benchmarks indicate that our method can provide shorter test time compared with recent works.