A Core-based ATPG Approach For a 5 Million Flop Design
Charles Njinda
Cisco Systems, Inc.
San Jose, CA
www.cisco.com
ABSTRACT
Traditional scan-based test techniques are losing ground on
today's SoC designs. Scaling
technology and increasing design sizes equate to an overwhelming increase in test data volume,
test application time and power consumption during test. Today, it becomes almost impossible to
test a complex SoC design once it reaches manufacturing. Using a core-based divide-and-
conquer approach combined with scan compression and power-aware automatic test pattern
generation (ATPG) helps to manage complexity, turn-around time, test data volume, test
application time and power consumption during testing. This paper describes the DFT strategies
combining core wrappers and scan compression, discusses the core-based ATPG results and
analyzes the costs and benefits of such an approach.