Testing methods for detecting stuck-open power switches in coarse-grain MTCMOS designs

Authors:
Szu-Pang Mu;Yi-Ming Wang;Hao-Yu Yang;Mango C.-T. Chao;Shi-Hao Chen;Chih-Mou Tseng;Tsung-Ying Tsai
Affiliations:
National Chiao-Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan;National Chiao-Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan;National Chiao-Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan;National Chiao-Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan;Global Unichip Corp, Hsinchu, Taiwan;Global Unichip Corp, Hsinchu, Taiwan;Global Unichip Corp, Hsinchu, Taiwan
Venue:
Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer-Aided Design
Year:
2010

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Abstract

Coarse-grain multi-threshold CMOS (MTCMOS) is an effective power-gating technique to reduce IC's leakage power consumption by turning off idle devices with MTCMOS power switches. In this paper, we study the usage of coarse-grain MTCMOS power switches for both logic circuits and SRAMs, and then propose corresponding methods of testing stuck-open power switches for each of them. For logic circuits, a specialized ATPG framework is proposed to generate a longest possible robust test while creating as many effective transitions in the switch-centered region as possible. For SRAMs, a novel test algorithm is proposed to exercise the worst-case power consumption and performance when stuck-open power switches exist. The experimental results based on an industrial MTCMOS technology demonstrate the advantage of our proposed testing methods on detecting stuck-open power switches for both logic circuits and SRAMs, when compared to conventional testing methods.