A New Test Scheduling Method Based on Evolutionary Programming Algorithms for System-on-Chip

Recent advancements in VLSI technology have made possible to design entire systems onto a single chip, i.e. system-on-chip (SOC). It is necessary to carry out the tests of SOC in order to insure the correctness of the manufacturing process. Test scheduling is an important aspect for the tests of SOC, which determines an assignment of cores to test access mechanism such that the overall test application time is minimized. In this paper, a new test scheduling approach using evolutionary programming technique is presented, which uses the individuals to represent the feasible solutions of test scheduling problem, and makes many individuals to form the populations. The better scheduling schemes are obtained by the evolutions of the populations. The partitions for the total bandwidth of test bus, as well as the assignments of cores to test access mechanism, can be obtained simultaneously in the approach. Experimental results for the SOC benchmark circuits demonstrate the proposed approach can solve the test scheduling problem in reasonable time