Adaptive Temperature-Aware SoC Test Scheduling Considering Process Variation

High temperature and process variation are undesirable effects for modern systems-on-chip. The high temperature is a prominent issue during test and should be taken care of during the test process. Modern SoCs, affected by large process variation, experience rapid and large temperature deviations and, therefore, a traditional static test schedule which is unaware of these deviations will be suboptimal in terms of speed and/or thermal-safety. This paper presents an adaptive test scheduling method which addresses the temperature deviations and acts accordingly in order to improve the test speed and thermal-safety. The proposed method is divided into a computationally intense offline-phase, and a very simple online-phase. In the offline-phase a schedule tree is constructed, and in the online-phase the appropriate path in the schedule tree is traversed, step by step and based on temperature sensor readings. Experiments have demonstrated the efficiency of the proposed method.