A New Architecture to Cross-Fertilize On-Line and Manufacturing Testing

This paper deals with the on-line test of SoCs including cores equipped with BIST circuitry and IEEE 1500 wrappers. A method is proposed, which exploits an Infrastructure IP named OTC to manage the on-line test, the OTC module activates the test and provides the related results under the software control of the CPU, thus allowing the SoC to autonomously and flexibly support the on-line test, both at startup and during the normal operation phase. The main advantage of the proposed method lies in the fact that the same hardware resources used for manufacturing test can be exploited for on-line test. Experimental results gathered on a case study system show the benefits and costs of the approach.