A partition-based approach for identifying failing scan cells in scan-BIST with applications to system-on-chip fault diagnosis

We present a new partition-based fault diagnosis technique for identifying failing scan cells in a scan-BIST environment. This approach relies on a two-step scan chain partitioning scheme. In the first step, an interval-based partitioning scheme is used to generate a small number of partitions, where each element of a partition consists of a set of scan cells. In the second step, additional partitions are created using an earlier-proposed random-selection partitioning method. Two-step partitioning leads to higher diagnostic resolution than a scheme that relies only on random-selection partitioning, with only a small amount of additional hardware. The proposed scheme is especially suitable for a system-on-chip (SOC) composed of multiple embedded cores, where test access is provided by means of a TestRail that is threaded through the internal scan chains of the embedded cores. We present experimental results for the six largest ISCAS-89 benchmark circuits and for two SOCs crafted from some of the ISCAS-89 circuits.