Extending JTAG for testing signal integrity in SoCs

As the technology is shrinking and the working frequency is going into the multi Gigahertz range, the issues related to interconnect testing are becoming more dominant. Specifically, signal integrity loss issues are becoming more important, and detection and diagnosis of these losses are becoming a great challenge. In this paper, an enhanced boundary scan architecture, with slight modification in the boundary scan cells, is proposed to test signal integrity in SoC interconnects. Our extended JTAG architecture: 1) minimizes scan-in operation by using modified boundary scan cells in pattern generation; and 2) incorporates the integrity loss information within the modified observation cells. To fully comply with the JTAG standard, we propose two new instructions, one for pattern generation and the other for scanning out the captured signal integrity information.