Functional Pattern Generation for Asynchronous Designs in a Test Processor Environment

Testing asynchronous circuits has been a challenge for several years. Especially, the nondeterministic timing behavior leads to problems during test, since the occurrence of test responses is not aligned to tester cycles. For this reason a test processor solution for asynchronous circuits has been recently provided, compensating the timing uncertainty. This is achieved by realizing an elastic test via asynchronous handshaking. Based on this approach we present a method for generating functional test patterns for the provided architecture.