Publikation
VecTHOR: Low-cost compression architecture for IEEE-1149.1-compliant TAP controllers
Sebastian Huhn; Stephan Eggersglüß; Rolf Drechsler
In: 21st IEEE European Test Symposium. IEEE European Test Symposium (ETS-21), 21st, May 24-27, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2016.
Zusammenfassung
This work presents a new dynamically configurable compression architecture to be integrated directly into the test access mechanism of System-on-Chip (SoC) designs using IEEE 1149 compliant interfaces. The proposed technique reduces the test data volume without loosing the full legacy support, no extra IO pins are needed and the additional allocated hardware resources are negligible. Particularly, this technique is suitable for board as well as in-field testing, which both use typically a Test Access Mechanism (TAM) like IEEE 1149. Here, strong memory limitations exist on the test equipment, which restrict the testing or debugging capabilities for complex designs. Various benchmarks for random test data, representing highly pre-compressed test data, as well as fully-specified test data for selected industrial circuit designs were run and discussed to evaluate this new approach. These experiments clearly show a high test data volume reduction. Additionally, a noticeable reduction of the overall number of required test cycles are achieved for most of the test cases.