Bonita Bhaskaran, A. Sanghani, Kaushik Narayanun, Ayub Abdollahian, A. Laknaur
{"title":"Test method and scheme for low-power validation in modern SOC integrated circuits","authors":"Bonita Bhaskaran, A. Sanghani, Kaushik Narayanun, Ayub Abdollahian, A. Laknaur","doi":"10.1109/VTS.2016.7477310","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/VTS.2016.7477310","url":null,"abstract":"Test Mode power can be 5X higher than functional power in GPUs, while the power grid is designed only for worst-case functional toggle. The large simultaneous switching noise induced on the power rails during at-speed capture testing is constrained by means of hardware solution. To determine the best low power mode for ATPG, we propose novel techniques to: estimate global peak current (di), determine local droop trend and validate and further optimize chosen power settings with exhaustive post-silicon power mode tuning. During Power Optimization (PO) phase, the measured clock frequency (fclk) and Vdroop are analyzed on every pattern and test coverage and pattern count are optimized for the production pattern set. We share correlation results and Power Supply Noise (PSN) distribution for the production pattern set on recent 28-nm GPUs.","PeriodicalId":124707,"journal":{"name":"2016 IEEE 34th VLSI Test Symposium (VTS)","volume":"55 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-04-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127081369","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Maha Kooli, Firas Kaddachi, G. D. Natale, A. Bosio
{"title":"Cache- and register-aware system reliability evaluation based on data lifetime analysis","authors":"Maha Kooli, Firas Kaddachi, G. D. Natale, A. Bosio","doi":"10.1109/VTS.2016.7477299","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/VTS.2016.7477299","url":null,"abstract":"Developing new methods to evaluate the software reliability in an early design stage of the system can save the design costs and efforts, and will positively impact product time-to-market. This paper introduces a new approach to evaluate, at early design phase, the reliability of a computing system running a software. The approach can be used when the hardware architecture is not completely defined yet. In order to be independent of the hardware architecture and at the same time accurate, we propose to use the Low-Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) framework. In addition, to reduce the reliability evaluation time, our approach consists in analyzing the variable lifetimes to compute the probability of masked faults. Finally, to achieve a better characterization we propose to consider also the presence of caches and register files. For this purpose, a cache emulator as well as a register file emulator are developed. Simulations run with our approach produce very similar results to those run with a hardware-based fault injector. This proves the accuracy of our approach to evaluate system reliability with a gain in the simulation time and without requiring a hardware platform.","PeriodicalId":124707,"journal":{"name":"2016 IEEE 34th VLSI Test Symposium (VTS)","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-04-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130729966","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Chih-Ying Tsai, Kao-Chi Lee, Chien-Hsueh Lin, Sung-Chu Yu, Wen-Rong Liau, A. Hou, Ying-Yen Chen, Chun-Yi Kuo, Jih-Nung Lee, M. Chao
{"title":"Predicting Vt mean and variance from parallel Id measurement with model-fitting technique","authors":"Chih-Ying Tsai, Kao-Chi Lee, Chien-Hsueh Lin, Sung-Chu Yu, Wen-Rong Liau, A. Hou, Ying-Yen Chen, Chun-Yi Kuo, Jih-Nung Lee, M. Chao","doi":"10.1109/VTS.2016.7477268","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/VTS.2016.7477268","url":null,"abstract":"To measure the variation of device Vt requires long test for conventional WAT test structures. This paper presents a framework that can efficiently and effectively obtain the mean and variance of Vt for a large number of DUTs. The proposed framework applies the model-based random forest as its core model-fitting technique to learn a model that can predict the mean and variance of Vt based on only the combined Id measured from parallel connected DUTs. The experimental results based on the SPICE simulation of a UMC 28nm technology demonstrate that the proposed model-fitting framework can achieve a more than 99% R-squared for predicting both of Vt mean and variance. Compared to conventional WAT test structures using binary search, our proposed framework can achieve 42.9X speedup in turn of the required iterations of Id measurement per DUT.","PeriodicalId":124707,"journal":{"name":"2016 IEEE 34th VLSI Test Symposium (VTS)","volume":"63 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-04-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122965016","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Fault modeling and testing of resistive nonvolatile-8T SRAMs","authors":"Yu-Ting Li, Yong-Xiao Chen, Jin-Fu Li","doi":"10.1109/VTS.2016.7477303","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/VTS.2016.7477303","url":null,"abstract":"In modern system-on-chips (SOCs), static power consumption represents a significant portion of the chip power. Since static random access memory (SRAM) typically occupies more than one half of the chip area, static power of a SOC is mainly constituted by the SRAMs. Resistive nonvolatile-8T (Rnv8T) SRAM has been proposed to alleviate static power and preserve data in power-down mode and provide fast poweron speed. A Rnv8T SRAM cell is composed of a 6T SRAM cell, two resistive devices, and two transistors. In this paper, we define several memristor-related faults for the Rnv8T SRAM considering electrical defects. Also, a March-like test algorithm which can cover simple SRAM faults and defined memristor-related faults are proposed. In comparison with the existing work, the proposed March-like test needs longer test time, but provides better fault coverage on the targeted faults.","PeriodicalId":124707,"journal":{"name":"2016 IEEE 34th VLSI Test Symposium (VTS)","volume":"37 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-04-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116086332","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Post fabrication tuning of GaN based RF power amplifiers for pico-cell applications","authors":"M. R. Hasin, J. Kitchen","doi":"10.1109/VTS.2016.7477275","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/VTS.2016.7477275","url":null,"abstract":"The RF Power Amplifier (PA) is usually the bottleneck in designing high efficiency, high linearity wireless transceivers within any given power specification. Pico-cell basestation PAs deliver power in the range of 10 Watts, with aggressive gain and efficiency requirements for next generation cellular networks. The slightest variations in PA biasing or the input and output load networks can cause significant degradation in RF PA performance. This work discusses the impact of process variation and variability in input/output networks on RF performance, and suggests ways to regain various performance parameters through post fabrication tuning of the PA.","PeriodicalId":124707,"journal":{"name":"2016 IEEE 34th VLSI Test Symposium (VTS)","volume":"41 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-04-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127717292","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Yanhong Zhou, Huawei Li, Tiancheng Wang, Bo Liu, Yingke Gao, Xiaowei Li
{"title":"Path constraint solving based test generation for observability-enhanced branch coverage","authors":"Yanhong Zhou, Huawei Li, Tiancheng Wang, Bo Liu, Yingke Gao, Xiaowei Li","doi":"10.1109/VTS.2016.7477265","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/VTS.2016.7477265","url":null,"abstract":"Traditional coverage metrics in verification focus on controllability without taking observability into account, which may result in an artificially high coverage and a false sense of confidence. In this paper, we present a path constraint solving based test generation method at register-transfer level (RTL) for observability-enhanced branch coverage. The branches executed but not observed by a test sequence are identified as our target branches. The test generation for each target branch is converted to the process of covering multiple intermediate sub-target states sequentially to guarantee the execution and observation of the target branch. Valid input vectors are automatically generated by multicycle path constraint solving and simulation is guided by the abstract distance information to reach the sub-target states. Experimental results show that our approach can reduce the gap between branch coverage and observability-enhanced branch coverage.","PeriodicalId":124707,"journal":{"name":"2016 IEEE 34th VLSI Test Symposium (VTS)","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-04-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125239025","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Adaptive testing of analog/RF circuits using hardware extracted FSM models","authors":"Sabyasachi Deyati, B. Muldrey, A. Chatterjee","doi":"10.1109/VTS.2016.7477283","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/VTS.2016.7477283","url":null,"abstract":"The test generation problem for analog/RF circuits has been largely intractable due to the fact that repetitive circuit simulation for test stimulus optimization is extremely time-consuming. As a consequence, it is difficult, if not impossible, to generate tests for practical mixed-signal/RF circuits that include the effects of tester inaccuracies and measurement noise. To offset this problem and allow test generation to scale to different applications, we propose a new approach in which FSM models of mixed-signal/RF circuits are abstracted from hardware measurements on fabricated devices. These models allow accurate simulation of device behavior under arbitrary stimulus and thereby test stimulus generation, even after the device has been shipped to a customer. As a consequence, it becomes possible to detect process shifts with fine granularity and regenerate tests to adapt to process perturbations in a dynamic manner without losing test accuracy. A complete methodology for such adaptive testing of mixed-signal/RF circuits is developed in this paper. Simulation results and hardware measurements are used to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed techniques.","PeriodicalId":124707,"journal":{"name":"2016 IEEE 34th VLSI Test Symposium (VTS)","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-04-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126322895","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Infant mortality tests for analog and mixed-signal circuits","authors":"Suvadeep Banerjee, S. Natarajan","doi":"10.1109/VTS.2016.7477262","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/VTS.2016.7477262","url":null,"abstract":"A new methodology for extracting compact test stimuli from functional tests for infant mortality testing of analog circuits is proposed. The test stimuli are extracted such that they produce extremal electrical activity in the circuit to push latent defects over the edge to become hard defects. Results on analog modules from the receiver sub-system of a high speed serial interface show that tests that are about 1/5th the size of the original functional test can be extracted while achieving consistently at least 80% of the electrical activity of the functional test.","PeriodicalId":124707,"journal":{"name":"2016 IEEE 34th VLSI Test Symposium (VTS)","volume":"114 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-04-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132686511","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Security of emerging non-volatile memories: Attacks and defenses","authors":"Kaveh Shamsi, Yier Jin","doi":"10.1109/VTS.2016.7477293","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/VTS.2016.7477293","url":null,"abstract":"While the non-volatile memory (NVM) has often been discussed in the context of alternatives to SRAM and RRAM for performance improvements in modern computing systems, their unique properties which lead to security applications and security vulnerabilities have also raised interests. In this paper, we provide a comparative discussion on how the usage of NVMs in the context of security in terms of mitigating some of their vulnerabilities. Further, we discuss innovative implementations of NVMs in the creation of novel hardware security primitives. Through this survey, we expect to have more non-traditional security applications of NVMs in modern designs leveraging their unique properties.","PeriodicalId":124707,"journal":{"name":"2016 IEEE 34th VLSI Test Symposium (VTS)","volume":"140 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-04-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134461608","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Yield improvement of an EEPROM for automotive applications while maintaining high reliability","authors":"G. Schatzberger, F. Leisenberger, Peter Sarson","doi":"10.1109/VTS.2016.7477269","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/VTS.2016.7477269","url":null,"abstract":"In order to manufacture high quality and cost effective EEPROMs suitable for automotive under-hood applications several topics must be taken into account. As well as a high reliability EEPROM technology the choice of an advanced memory architecture including ECC and a highly sophisticated screening methodology in production test is necessary to achieve high quality in the field. The EEPROM production testflow must not only be able to screen out weaknesses of the process but must also be cost efficient. A majority of the tests executed in the EEPROM test flow are needed to check the quality of the processed oxides which are the basic elements to realize the EEPROM function of the memory. Most of these tests are complex and time consuming. This work will present an optimization of an existing EEPROM production testflow by means of thorough analysis of the faulty dice and the testflow leading to an increase of the yield without reducing quality.","PeriodicalId":124707,"journal":{"name":"2016 IEEE 34th VLSI Test Symposium (VTS)","volume":"55 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-04-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129841411","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}