Thermal-Aware Test Data Compression Using Dictionary Based Coding

Abstract

In this paper, we have proposed a new thermal-aware test data compression technique using dictionary based coding. Huge test data volume and chip temperature are two major challenges for test engineers. Temperature of a chip can be reduced to a large extent by minimizing transition count in scan chains using efficient don't-care filling. On the other hand, high compression ratio can be achieved by filling the don't-cares intelligently to get more similar sub-vectors from test vectors. Although, both of the problems rely on don't-care bit filling, most of the existing works have considered them as separate problems. In our work, we have combined both temperature reduction and compression into a single problem and solved it. We present an intermediate approach that performs a trade-off between temperature and compression ratio. Experimental results on ISCAS'89 and ITC'99 benchmarks show the flexibility of the proposed method to achieve a balance between temperature and compression ratio.