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In the last years, the phenomenon of electronic products passing all tests by the manufacturer but failing in the field (No Fault Found, or NFF) attracted the attention of industries and researchers. Delay faults are supposed to be among the contributors to this phenomenon. Hence, companies are increasingly adopting functional test as a final step, which is expected to detect this kind of defects...
Thermal and electrical stress phases are commonly applied to automotive devices at the end of manufacturing test to give rise to early life latent failures. This paper proposes a new methodology to optimize the stress procedures during the Burn-In phase. In the proposed method, stress of CPU, RAM memory and FLASH memory are run in parallel using DMA and CACHE interventions. The paper reports also...
The usage of electronic systems in safety-critical applications requires mechanisms for the early detection of faults affecting the hardware while the system is in the field. When the system includes a processor, one approach is to make use of functional test programs that are run by the processor itself. Such programs exercise the different parts of the system, and eventually expose the difference...
Software-Based Self-Test (SBST) is a recognized technique for in-field testing of microcontrollers that are used in safety critical environments. In this paper, we describe techniques for the generation of SBST programs to be run on-line by an embedded microprocessor to detect faults in the Floating-Point Unit (FPU). The illustrated methodology includes both the usage of Automatic Test Patterns Generation...
The IEEE 1687 standard describes reconfigurable structures allowing to flexibly access the instruments existing within devices (e.g., to support test, debug, calibration, etc.), by the use of configurable modules acting as controllable switches. The increasing adoption of this standard requires the availability of algorithms and tools to automate its usage. Since the resulting networks could inevitably...
The IEEE 1687 standard describes reconfigurable structures allowing to flexibly access the instruments existing within devices (e.g., to support test, diagnosis, calibration, etc.), by using configuration modules which act as controllable switches. The increasing adoption of this standard requires the availability of algorithms and tools to automate its usage. The resulting networks might be affected...
Thermal phenomena occurring along test execution at the final stages of the manufacturing flow are considered as a significant issue for several reasons, including dramatic effects like circuit damage that is leading to yield loss. This paper tries to redeem those bad guys in order to exploit them to improve the test quality, reducing the overall test cost without affecting the yield.
Due to the increasing usage of embedded instruments in many electronic devices, new solutions to effectively access these instruments appeared, including the new IEEE 1687 standard. The approach supported by IEEE 1687 allows a flexible access to embedded instruments through the Boundary Scan interface. The IEEE 1687 network includes a set of reconfigurable scan chains. This paper addresses the issue...
The growing usage of electronic systems in safety-critical applications requires effective solutions to early identify possible faults affecting the hardware while it is in the operational phase. A possible approach leverages functional programs to be run by the CPU typically existing in such systems. These programs must exercise the different parts of the system, and produce a behavior different...
Recently, several application areas in the test domain (e.g., burn-in and aging monitoring) started to require suitable input stimuli, able to maximize the switching activity of a certain module for a certain period of time. If the module is part of a processor, this turns into identifying a suitable sequence of instructions, able to maximize the switching activity. This paper proposes a method to...
Self-Test strategies for testing embedded processors are increasingly diffused. In this paper, we describe a set of self-test techniques tackling dual issue embedded processors. The paper details how to produce test programs suitable to detect stuck-at faults in computational modules belonging to dual issue processors. The proposed technique is aimed at extending single issue test programs; results...
The increasing complexity of electronic components based on microprocessors and their use in safetycritical application – like automotive devices – make reliability a critical aspect. During the life cycle of such products, it is needed to periodically check whether the processor cores are working correctly. In most cases, this task is performed by running short, fast and specialized test programs...
Multi-core systems are becoming particularly common, due to the high performance they can deliver. Their performance strongly depends on the availability of effective cache controllers, able to guarantee (among others) the coherence of the caches of the different cores. This paper proposes a method for the test of the cache coherence logic existing within each core in a multi-core system, resorting...
The paper is dealing with the in-field test of the decode unit of RIS C processors through functional test programs following the SBST approach. The paper details a strategy based on instruction classification and manipulation, and signatures collection. The method does not require the knowledge of detailed implementation information (e.g., the netlist), but is based on the Instruction Set of the...
When the result of a previous instruction is needed in the pipeline before it is available, a "data hazard" occurs. Register Forwarding and Pipeline Interlock (RF&PI) are mechanisms suitable to avoid data corruption and to limit the performance penalty caused by data hazards in pipelined microprocessors. Data hazards handling is part of the microprocessor control logic, its test...
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