Efficient Wrapper/TAM co-optimization for large SOCs

Core test wrappers and test access mechanisms (TAMs) are important components of a system-on-chip (SOC) test architecture. Wrapper/TAM co-optimization is necessary to minimize the SOC testing time. Most prior research in wrapper/TAM design has addressed wrapper design and TAM optimization as separate problems, thereby leading to results that are sub-optimal. We present a fast heuristic technique for wrapper/TAM co-optimization, and demonstrate its scalability for several industrial SOCs. This extends recent work on exact methods for wrapper/TAM co-optimization based on integer linear programming and exhaustive enumeration. We show that the SOC testing times obtained using the new heuristic algorithm are comparable to the testing times obtained using exact methods. Moreover more than two orders of magnitude reduction can be obtained in the CPU time compared to exact methods. Furthermore, we are now able to design efficient test access architectures with a larger number of TAMs.