Thermal-Aware Test Scheduling with Cycle-Accurate Power Profiles and Test Partitioning

摘要

Higher power densities and the non-linear spatial distribution of heat of VLSI chips put greater emphasis on chip-packaging and temperature control during test. For system-on-chips, power-based scheduling algorithms are used to optimize tests while satisfying power budgets. However, it has been shown mat power-constrained test scheduling does not ensure thermal safety due to the non-uniform power distribution across the chip. In this paper, we present a test schedule optimization method for system-on-chips using cycle-accurate power profiles for thermal simulation, test partitioning, and interleaving that ensures thermal safety while still optimizing the test schedule. Our method uses a simplified thermal-cost model and bin-packing algorithm to ensure that the maximum temperatures of SoCs with fixed TAM and core assignments satisfy the temperature constraints with minimum increases in test application time.