Partition Based SoC Test Scheduling with Thermal and Power Constraints under Deep Submicron Technologies

For core-based System-on-Chip (SoC) testing, conventional power-constrained test scheduling methods do not guarantee a thermal-safe solution. Also, most of the test scheduling schemes make poor assumptions about power consumption. In deep submicron era, leakage power and wake-up power consumption can not be neglected. In this paper, we propose a partition based thermal-aware test scheduling algorithm with more realistic assumptions of recent SoCs. In our test scheduling algorithm, each test is partitioned and the earliest starting time of each partition is searched. To reduce the execution time of thermal simulation, we also exploit superposition principle to compute the power and thermal profile rapidly and accurately. We apply our test scheduling algorithm to ITC’02 SoC benchmarks and the results show improvements in the total test time over scheduling schemes without partitioning.