Test scheduling in high performance VLSI system implementations

The authors provide tools for exploring the inherent parallelism introduced by design for testability (DFT) and built-in self-test (BIST) techniques in order to reduce test length. Since the potential for parallel test execution is most apparent at the organization level and DFT and BIST hardware is also often added at that level, the organization level is used as a foundation for the work. A broader modeling foundation that encompasses both dimensions, space and time, of test parallelism is introduced. A set of simple schedulability criteria for concurrent issuing of tests is developed. Effective suboptimum heuristic-based algorithms for scheduling tests on general-purpose high-performance VLSI system implementation are presented. The scheduling algorithms have been implemented and performance results are presented.<
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