16013811
A comprehensive fault macromodel for opamps
In this paper, a comprehensive macromodel for transistor level faults in an operational amplifier is developed. With the observation that faulty behavior at output may result from interfacing error in addition to the faulty component, parameters associated with input and output characteristics are incorporated. Test generation and fault classification are addressed for stand-alone opamps. A high fault coverage is achieved by a proposed testing strategy. Transistor level short/bridging faults are analyzed and classified into catastrophic faults and parametric faults. Based on the macromodels for parametric faults, faults simulation is performed for an active filter. We found many parametric faults in the active filter cannot be detected by traditional functional testing. A DFT scheme alone with a current testing strategy to improve fault coverage is proposed.
206516479
BIST TPG for SRAM cluster interconnect testing at board level
A Built-In Self-Test (BIST) methodology and a test pattern generation (TPG) architecture for testing static random access memory (SRAM) interconnect at board level via IEEE 1149.1 Boundary Scan (BS) Architecture are presented. Due to the expense and complexity of BS circuitry the widely-used SRAMs on most modern telecommunication circuit boards seldom contain BS architecture. (We call such non-boundary scan ICs cluster-ICs.) Hence, a methodology that tests the large numbers of board-level interconnects at the control, address, and data lines of cluster SRAMs is necessary. This is especially essential for board-level interconnect BIST which is used not only for manufacturing testing but also for system testing after integration. Newly identified prohibited conditions, which enable re-arrangement and merger of tests, are incorporated into test conditions for SRAM cluster interconnects. These improvements have been exploited to develop an efficient test procedure that is suitable for BIST. The proposed BIST methodology generates TPGs that (i) guarantee the avoidance of multi-driver conflicts when testing via BSA, (ii) guarantee the detection of all testable SRAM cluster interconnect faults, (iii) have low area overhead, and (iv) have short test lengths.
45533435
BIST TPG for combinational cluster (glue logic) interconnect testing at board level
Due to the expense and complexity of boundary scan architecture (BSA) circuitry, non-boundary scan ICs (cluster ICs) are still used in modern circuit boards. A novel BIST architecture and a TPG design methodology to program this architecture are presented for testing inter-IC interconnects among combinational cluster ICs via IEEE 1149.1 BSA at board level. The two main issues that are tackled are: (1) safe testing, i.e., avoidance of conflicts at all multi-driver nets; and (2) obtaining complete coverage of all detectable faults in the interconnect. We have proposed a realistic model of interconnects that contain combinational cluster ICs, identified test requirements that must be satisfied by the TPG to achieve the above objectives, and developed a new TPG architecture that satisfies these test requirements. We have theoretically proven that the proposed technique guarantees safe and comprehensive testing of cluster interconnects and also demonstrated this fact via its applications to a few example circuits.
206766191
Accurate and efficient static timing analysis with crosstalk
We have developed an accurate and efficient methodology to perform static timing analysis (STA) in combinational logic blocks in the presence of multiple crosstalk-induced noise effects. The crosstalk model used is more accurate because it considers skew, input transition times, and driver strengths. This crosstalk model is enhanced to handle timing ranges for performing STA. The methodology also uses more accurate delay models for gates. The presence of one or more coupling capacitances can create cyclic timing dependencies, even in an otherwise acyclic circuit. We have developed an approach to partition the circuit into minimal timing-iterative subcircuits (TISs) that encapsulate the cyclic timing dependencies. When used in conjunction with our levelization procedure, iterative timing analysis is confined within individual TISs. We have demonstrated that the maximum arrival time values computed by the proposed STA using integrated delay models are much closer to detailed circuit simulation results than an STA that uses the 3C/sub c/ delay model.
5347587
Process aggravated noise (PAN): new validation and test problems
How the trends in circuit design are increasing the significance of noise effects, such as crosstalk and ground bounce, is demonstrated. Further aggravated by process variations, these process aggravated noise (PAN) effects must be considered as an integral part of the design validation methodology. It is shown that the validation of a design in the presence of PAN effects requires simulation at new design corners that are not typically considered during the validation of digital CMOS circuits. Furthermore, it is shown that the choice of a new design corner depends not only on the particular PAN effect under consideration, but also on the nature of the circuit. We demonstrate the need for automating the process of selecting design corners as well as test sequences for validation and outline strategies for their automation.
5894578
Test embedding with discrete logarithms
When using Built-In Self Test (BIST) for testing VLSI circuits, a major concern is the generation of proper test patterns that detect the faults of interest. Usually a linear feedback shift register (LFSR) is used to generate test patterns. We first analyze the probability that an arbitrary pseudo-random test sequence of short length detects all faults. The term short is relative to the probability of detecting the fault having the fewest test patterns. We then show how to guide the search for an initial state (seed) for a LFSR with a given primitive feedback polynomial so that all the faults of interest are detected by a minimum length test sequence. Our algorithm is based on finding the location of test patterns in the sequence generated by this LPSR. This is accomplished using, the theory of discrete logarithms. We then select the shortest subsequence that includes test patterns for all the faults of interest, hence resulting in 100% fault coverage. >
16361691
Cost-efficient soft error protection for embedded microprocessors
Device scaling trends dramatically increase the susceptibility of microprocessors to soft errors. Further, mounting demand for embedded microprocessors in a wide array of safety critical applications, ranging from automobiles to pacemakers, compounds the importance of addressing the soft error problem. Historically, soft error tolerance techniques have been targeted mainly at high-end server markets, leading to solutions such as coarse-grained modular redundancy and redundant multithreading. However, these techniques tend to be prohibitively expensive to implement in the embedded design space. To address this problem, we first present a thorough analysis of the effects of soft errors on a production-grade, fully synthesized implementation of an ARM926EJ-S embedded microprocessor. We then leverage this analysis in the design of two orthogonal low-costs of terror protection techniques that can be tuned to achieve variable levels of fault coverage as a function of area and power constraints. The first technique uses a small cache of live register values in order to provide nearly twice the fault coverage of a register file protected using traditional error correcting codes at little or no additional area cost. The second technique is a statistical method used to significantly reduce the overhead of deploying time-delayed shadow latches for low-latency fault detection.
1183946
Geometric algorithms for automated design of multi-piece permanent molds
Abstract Multi-piece molds, which consist of more than two mold pieces, are capable of producing very complex parts—parts that cannot be produced by the traditional molds. The tooling cost is also low for multi-piece molds, which makes it a candidate for pre-production prototyping and bridge tooling. However, designing multi-piece molds is a time-consuming task. This article describes geometric algorithms for automated design of multi-piece molds. A multi-piece mold design algorithm has been developed to automate several important mold-design steps: finding parting directions, locating parting lines, creating parting surfaces, and constructing mold pieces. This algorithm constructs mold pieces based on global accessibility analysis results of the part and therefore guarantees the disassembly of the mold pieces. A software system has been developed, which has been successfully tested on several complex industrial parts.
13275430
Synthesizing Efficient Out-of-Core Programs for Block Recursive Algorithms Using Block-Cyclic Data Distributions
In this paper, we present a framework for synthesizing I/O efficient out-of-core programs for block recursive algorithms, such as the fast Fourier transform (FFT) and block matrix transposition algorithms. Our framework uses an algebraic representation which is based on tensor products and other matrix operations. The programs are optimized for the striped Vitter and Shriver's two-level memory model in which data can be distributed using various cyclic(B) distributions in contrast to the normally used physical track distribution cyclic(B/sub d/), where B/sub d/ is the physical disk block size. We first introduce tensor bases to capture the semantics of block-cyclic data distributions of out-of-core data and also data access patterns to out-of-core data. We then present program generation techniques for tensor products and matrix transposition. We accurately represent the number of parallel I/O operations required for the synthesized programs for tensor products and matrix transposition as a function of tensor bases and data distributions. We introduce an algorithm to determine the data distribution which optimizes the performance of the synthesized programs. Further, we formalize the procedure of synthesizing efficient out-of-core programs for tensor product formulas with various block-cyclic distributions as a dynamic programming problem. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through several examples. We show that the choice of an appropriate data distribution can reduce the number of passes to access out-of-core data by as large as eight times for a tensor product and the dynamic programming approach can largely reduce the number of passes to access out-of-core data for the overall tensor product formulas.
7271224
Speculation techniques for high level synthesis of control intensive designs
The quality of synthesis results for most high level synthesis approaches is strongly affected by the choice of control flow (through conditions and loops) in the input description. In this paper, we explore the effectiveness of various types of code motions, such as moving operations across conditionals, out of conditionals (speculation) and into conditionals (reverse speculation), and how they can be effectively directed by heuristics so as to lead to improved synthesis results in terms of fewer execution cycles and fewer number of states in the finite state machine controller. We also study the effects of the code motions on the area and latency of the final synthesized netlist. Based on speculative code motions, we present a novel way to perform early condition execution that leads to significant improvements in highly control-intensive designs. Overall, reductions of up to 38 \% in execution cycles are obtained with all the code motions enabled.
17496994
On finding optimal registrations in presence of overlapping registration areas
Personal Communication Services (PCS) standards such as IS-41 and GSM use a location management scheme which is based on registration areas (RA). Overlapping of registration areas has been proposed to reduce the overhead of location updates in such systems (4]. Overlapping RAs form regions in which a mobile has a choice in selecting which RA to register to. The choice of current RA has implication on the number of registrations a mobile may require in the future. In this paper we investigate the problem of finding the best (or optimal) registration for a user in a cellular PCS environment with overlapping Registration Areas (RAs). We study two versions of the problem: (i) the deterministic version, where the entire trajectory of the mobile is known a-priori, and (ii) the stochastic version, where the trajectory of the mobile is not known a-priori but the system has the knowledge of mobility pattern of the mobile. The mobility pattern is modeled as a stochastic random walk across regions. In the deterministic case the method presented computes an optimal solution to the registration problem. In the stochastic case we present a method which determines the registration which minimizes the expected number of registrations by looking ahead at the probable paths which may be traversed by the mobile in future. The paper also proposes a preemptive and a non-preemptive version of the stochastic method which incur different numbers of hard and soft registration operations.