A Novel Test Scheduling Algorithm Considering Variations of Power Consumption in Embedded Cores of SoCs

Test scheduling considering power dissipation is an effective technique to reduce the testing time of complex SoCs and to enhance fault coverage under limitation of allowed maximum power dissipation. In this paper, a modeling technique of test resources and a test scheduling algorithm for efficient test procedures are proposed and confirmed. For test resources modeling, two methods are described. One is to use the maximum point and next maximum point of power dissipation in test resources, the other one is to model test resources by partitioning of them. A novel heuristic test scheduling algorithm, using the extended-tree-growing-graph for generation of maximum embedded cores usable simultaneously by using relations between test resources and cores and power-dissipation-changing-graph for power optimization, is presented and compared with conventional algorithms to verify its efficiency.