Thermal-Aware Test Scheduling for Core-Based SoC in an Abort-on-First-Fail Test Environment

Long test application time and high temperature have become two major issues of system-on-chip (SoC) test. In order to minimize test application times and avoid overheating during tests, we propose a thermal-aware test scheduling technique for core-based SoC in an abort-on-first-fail (AOFF) test environment. The AOFF environment assumes that the test process is terminated as soon as the first fault is detected, which is usually deployed in volume production test. To avoid high temperature, test sets are partitioned into test sub-sequences which are separated by cooling periods. The proposed test scheduling technique utilizes instantaneous thermal simulation results to guide the partitioning of test sets and to determine the lengths of cooling periods. Experimental results have shown that the proposed technique is efficient to minimize the expected test application time while keeping the temperatures of cores under test below the imposed temperature limit.