Test Scheduling of SOC with Power Constraint Based on Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm

The rapid development of modern VLSI technology allows incorporating a complete system on a single chip using the system-on-chip (SOC) methodology. Test scheduling solution for SOC embedded IP cores is a very complex problem. It is necessary to test these cores in parallel for reducing test time. This paper presents an efficient approach based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm for the test scheduling problem of core-based SOCs with power constraint. PSO algorithm is improved on so that the algorithm can be used to optimize SOC testing. The cores are assigned to test access mechanism (TAM) of given widths such that the total test time is minimized. Experimental results for ITC’02 benchmarks demonstrate that the method has better performance and lower testing time compared to other heuristic algorithms in test scheduling of SOC.