At-Speed Testing of Core-Based System-on-Chip Using an Embedded Micro-Tester

In SoC designs, limited test access to internal cores, low-cost external tester´s lack of accuracy and slow frequencies make application of at-speed tests impractical. Therefore, this paper presents an embedded micro-tester for testing IEEE1500-compliant SoCs. In the proposed approach, the test program is no more executed by the external tester but by the embedded micro-tester. Under the control of the embedded SoC microprocessor, the micro-tester executes the test programs stored outside of the SoC in an external memory. The micro-tester supports stuck-at testing as well as both at-speed testing techniques: launch-on-last-shift (LOLS) and launch-on-capture (LOC). Using the ITC´02 benchmarks, experimental results are presented: test application time, test data volume and area overhead