Design for Test and Diagnosis of Power Switches

Power gating techniques have been adopted so far to reduce the static power consumption of integrated circuits (ICs). Power gating is usually implemented by means of several power switches (PSs). Manufacturing defects affecting PSs can lead to increase in the actual static power consumption and, in the worst case, they can completely isolate a functional block in the IC. Thus, efficient test and diagnosis solutions are needed. In this paper, we present a novel Design for Test and Diagnosis (DfTD) solution able to increase the test quality and diagnosis accuracy of PSs. The proposed approach has been validated through SPICE simulations on ITC’99 benchmark circuits as well as on industrial test cases.

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