A Functional Approach to Testing Bit-Sliced Microprocessors

Bit-sliced microprocessors are representative of an important class of LSI components that can be interconnected in a regular way to construct many useful types of digital systems. This paper develops an analytic test generation methodology for bit-sliced systems. A formal model C for a 1-bit bit-sliced microprocessor is defined which has the main features of many commercially available microprocessors. Using a functional fault model instead of the usual stuck-line fault model, a technique is presented for deriving a complete and near-minimal sequence of tests for C. The basic cell C is extended to form two more general cells Ck and Ck. n. Ck is a k-bit version of C, while Ck, n is Ck with an n × k-bit scratchpad RAM. The internal structure of C4,16 closely resembles that of the AMD 2901 processor slice. Test sequences for these cells are derived in much the same way as for C. It is shown that the test sequence for a single cell (C, Ck, or Ck, n) can easily be extended to a test sequence for an array of N identical cells with no increase in the number of tests required. It is observed that for test generation purposes, bit-sliced microprocessors can be viewed as C-testable iterative logic arrays, which require a constant number of test patterns independent of array size. Some new results on test generation for C-testable systems are presented, as well as a method for modifying iterative logic arrays to make them C-testable.