Design for Testability of Software-Based Self-Test for Processors

In this paper, the authors propose a design for testability method for test programs of software-based self-test using test program templates. Software-based self-test using templates has a problem of error masking where some faults detected in a test generation for a module are not detected by the test program synthesized from the test. The proposed method achieves 100% template level fault efficiency in a sense that the proposed method completely resolves the problem of error masking. Moreover, the proposed method adds only observation points to the original design, and it enables at-speed testing and does not induce delay overhead