Adaptive test selection for post-silicon timing validation: A data mining approach

Abstract

Test failure data produced during post-silicon validation contain accurate design- and process-specific information about the DUD (design-under-debug). Prior research efforts and industry practice focused on feeding this information back to the design flow via bug root-cause analysis. However, the value of this silicon data for helping further improvement of the post-silicon validation process has been largely overlooked. In this paper, we propose an adaptive test selection method to progressively tune the validation plan using knowledge automatically mined from the bug sightings during post-silicon validation. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed fault-model-free data mining approach can prioritize those tests capable of uncovering more silicon timing errors, resulting in significant reduction of validation time and effort.