An Efficient SoC Test Technique by Reusing On/Off-Chip Bus Bridge

Abstract

Today's system-on-a-chip (SoC) is designed with reusable intellectual property cores to meet short time-to-market requirements. However, the increasing cost of testing becomes a big burden in manufacturing a highly integrated SoC. In this paper, an efficiently testable design technique is introduced for an SoC with an on/off-chip bus bridge for the on-chip advanced high-performance bus and off-chip peripheral-component-interconnect bus. The bridge is exploited by maximally reusing the bridge function to achieve efficient functional and structural testing. The testing time can be significantly reduced by increasing the number of test channels and shortening the test-control protocols. Experimental results show that area overhead and testing times are considerably reduced in both functional- and structural-test modes. The proposed technique can be extended to the other types of on/off-chip bus bridges.