A common approachfor large industrial designs is to use logic built-in self-test (LBIST)followed by test data from an external tester. Because the fault coverage with LBIST alone is not suficient, there is a need to top-up the fault coverage with additional deterministic test patterns from an external tester. Thispaper proposes a technique of combining LBIST and deterministic ATPG to form “hybrid test patterns ’’ which merge pseudo-random and deterministic test data. Experiments have been done on the Motorola PowerPCTMmicroprocessor core to study the proposed hybrid test patterns. Hybrid test patterns provide several advantages: I ) can be applied using STUMPS architecture [Bardell 821 with a minor modification, 2) significantly reduce external test data stored in tester memory, 3) reduce the number of pseudorandompattems by orders of magnitude, thus addressing power issues.
Debaleena Das, Nur A. Touba