Critical Path -- Oriented 38 Thermal Aware X-Filling for High Un-modeled Defect Coverage
Fotios Vartziotis1 and Xrysovalantis Kavousianos2
1Computer Science and Engineering, University of Ioannina, Greece, Computer Engineering, T.E.I. of Epirus, Greece.
fvartzi@teiep.gr
2Computer Science and Engineering, University of Ioannina, Greece.
kabousia@cs.uoi.gr
ABSTRACT
The thermal activity during testing can be considerably reduced by applying power-oriented filling of the unspecified bits of test vectors. However, traditional power-oriented X-fill methods do not correlate the thermal activity with delay failures, and they consume all the unspecified bits to reduce the power dissipation at every region of the core. Therefore, they adversely affect the un-modeled defect coverage of the generated test vectors. The proposed method identifies the unspecified bits that are more critical for delay failures, and it fills them in such a way as to create a thermal-safe neighborhood around the most critical regions of the core. For the rest of the unspecified bits a probabilistic model based on output deviations is adopted to increase the un-modeled defect coverage of the test vectors.
