Generating low-power ATPG

patterns using a shift power budget

Pascal BLANC
STEricsson
OUTLINE

• Case study
• Current low-power adjacent fill
• Shift power effort feature
• Experimental work
– simulation
– silicon
• Conclusions

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CASE STUDY

• Application: Baseband
• Technology: 65 nm
• Complexity: 280,000 FFs
• Scan configuration:
– DFTMax compression
– 17 test clock domains
– 65 external channels
– 3276 internal scan chains
– 89 Flip-Flops per scan chain in compression mode
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CURRENT LOW-POWER ADJACENT FILL (1/2)

• Exists in TetraMAX since several releases

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 CURRENT LOW-POWER ADJACENT FILL (2/2)

• Advantages
– Reduce the average switching
activity in shift mode
– Easy to setup

• Improvements required
– More effective in a compression
mode
– First patterns less “power-
hungry”
– Reduce peak switching activity in
shift mode
– Control the adjacent fill efficiency

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SHIFT POWER EFFORT FEATURE

• Introduced in TetraMAX d-2010.03 (LCA)

• Command :
set_atpg –fill adjacent \
–shift_power_effort {low|medium|high}

• Care bits differently treated

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EXPERIMENTAL WORK – SIMULATION (1/2)

• Single stuck-at fault model

– CPU time and test coverage not affected

– Pattern number inflation acceptable for the “low” value
– Average shift switching activity reduced at least by 50%
– Peak shift switching activity reduced at least by 30%

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EXPERIMENTAL WORK – SIMULATION (2/2)

• No peaks in the first patterns

• Switching activity gap in the middle of the set of patterns
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EXPERIMENTAL WORK – SILICON

• Marginalities due to the IR-drop effects disappeared

• Shift frequency increased by about 10%
• Same silicon behavior for the 3 different power effort values as
the simulation Pascal BLANC

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 CONCLUSIONS

• Good benefits :
– Significant shift switching activity reduction (average and peak)
– Increase the scan shift frequency on silicon
– Possibility to control the switching activity
– No excessive peak power consumption in the first test vectors
– No DFT feature nor basic design modifications needed

• Improvements needed :
– Huge difference between the high case and the low and medium ones
– Switching activity not constant during the overall set of patterns

• Usage deeply deployed internally to ST and ST-Ericsson

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 End

Thanks for your attention

Pascal BLANC

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