ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES)
An efficient link controller for test access to IP core-based embedded system chips
ACSAC'07 Proceedings of the 12th Asia-Pacific conference on Advances in Computer Systems Architecture
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The emergence of megacores in hierarchical system-on-a-chip (SOC) presents new challenges to electronic test automation. This paper describes a new framework for designing test access mechanisms (TAMs) for modular testing of hierarchical SOCs. We first explore the concept that TAMs on the same level of design hierarchy employ multiple frequencies for test data transportation. Then we extend this concept to hierarchical SOCs and, by introducing frequency converters at the inputs and outputs of the megacores, the proposed solution not only removes the constraint that the system level TAM width must be wider than the internal TAM width of the megacores, but also facilitates rapid exploration of the tradeoffs between the test application time and the required test area. Experimental results for the ITC'02 SOC Test Benchmarks show that the proposed TAM design algorithms increase the size of the solution space that is explored, which, in turn, will lower the test application time when compared to the existing solutions.