Symbolic macro test for DSP systems applied to a voice coder application

The authors present a hierarchical symbolic macro test approach for heterogeneous systems applied to a complex voice coder application. This design has been generated with the Cathedral high-level synthesis environment and obeys the Macro design and test concept. The proposed test approach starts by generating the test set for all the primitive macro´s (PLAs, ROMs, RAMs, data path building blocks, multi-level logic FSMs) using dedicated test generation tools. Then these test sets are assembled at the data path and system level using our new symbolic macro test method to obtain a test program for the whole voice coder chip. The method efficiently supports partial scan, reconvergent paths, varying word lengths of connections and test compaction