Scan pattern retargeting and merging with reduced access time

Abstract

Efficient access to on-chip instrumentation is a key enabler for post-silicon validation, debug, bringup or diagnosis. Reconfigurable scan networks, as proposed by e.g. the IEEE Std. P1687, emerge as an effective and affordable means to cope with the increasing complexity of on-chip infrastructure. To access an element in a reconfigurable scan network, a scan-in bit sequence must be generated according to the current state and structure of the network. Due to sequential and combinational dependencies, the scan pattern generation process (pattern retargeting) poses a complex decision and optimization problem. This work presents a method for scan pattern generation with reduced access time. We map the access time reduction to a pseudo-Boolean optimization problem, which enables the use of efficient solvers to exhaustively explore the search space of valid scan-in sequences. This is the first automated method for efficient pattern retargeting in complex reconfigurable scan architectures such as P1687-based networks. It supports the concurrent access to multiple target scan registers (access merging) and generates reduced (short) scan-in sequences, considering all sequential and combinational dependencies. The proposed method achieves an access time reduction by up to 88× or 2.4× in average w.r.t. unoptimized satisfying solutions.