238 research outputs found
Scan architecture with mutually exclusive scan segment activation for shift and capture power reduction
No full textPower dissipation during scan testing is becoming an important concern as design sizes and gate densities increase. While several approaches have been recently proposed for reducing power dissipation during the shift cycle (minimum transition don't care fill, special scan cells and scan chain partitioning), very little work has been carried out towards reducing the peak power during test response capture and the few existing approaches for reducing capture power rely on complex ATPG algorithms. This paper proposes a scan architecture with mutually exclusive scan segment activation which overcomes the shortcomings of previous approaches. The proposed architecture achieves both shift and capture power reduction with no impact on the performance of the design, and with minimal impact on area and testing time (typically 2-3%). An algorithmic procedure for assigning flip-flips to scan segments enables reuse of test patterns generated by standard ATPG tools. An implementation of the proposed method had been integrated into an automated design flow using commercial synthesis and simulation tools which was used on a wide range of benchmark designs. Reductions up to 57% in average power, and up to 44% and 34% in peak power dissipation during shift and capture cycles, respectively, were obtained when using two scan segments. Increasing the number of scan segments to six leads to reductions of 96% and 80% in average power and respectively maximum number of simultaneous transitions
Numerically efficient modeling of CNT transistors with ballistic and non-ballistic effects for circuit simulation
No full textThis paper presents an efficient carbon nanotube (CNT) transistor modeling technique which is based on cubic spline approximation of the non-equilibrium mobile charge density. The approximation facilitates the solution of the selfconsistent voltage equation in a carbon nanotube so that calculation of the CNT drain-source current is accelerated by at least two orders of magnitude. A salient feature of the proposed technique is its ability to incorporate both ballistic and nonballistic transport effects without a significant computational cost. The proposed models have been extensively validated against reported CNT ballistic and non-ballistic transport theories and experimental results
Quasi-Static Voltage Scaling for Energy Minimization with Time Constraints
No full textSupply voltage scaling and adaptive body-biasing are important tech-niques that help to reduce the energy dissipation of embedded systems. This is achieved by dynamically adjusting the voltage and performance settings according to the application needs. In order to take full ad-vantage of slack that arises from variations in the execution time, it is important to recalculate the voltage (performance) settings during run-time, i.e., online. However, voltage scaling (VS) is computationally ex-pensive, and thus significantly hampers the possible energy savings. To overcome the online complexity, we propose a quasi-static voltage scal-ing scheme, with a constant online time complexity O(1). This allows to increase the exploitable slack as well as to avoid the energy dissipated due to online recalculation of the voltage settings. We conduct several experiments that demonstrate the advantages of the proposed technique over the previously published voltage scaling approaches
Diagnosis of Multiple-Voltage Design with Bridge Defect
No full textMultiple voltage is an effective dynamic power reduction design technique commonly used in low-power ICs. To the best of our knowledge, there is no reported work for diagnosing multiple-voltage enabled ICs, and the aim of this paper is to propose a method for diagnosing bridge defects in such ICs. By using synthesized ISCAS benchmarks, with realistic extracted bridges and a parametric fault model, this paper investigates the impact of varying supply voltage on the accuracy of diagnosis and demonstrates how the additional voltage settings can be leveraged to improve the diagnosis resolution through a novel multivoltage diagnosis algorithm. In addition, it also identifies the most useful voltage settings to reduce diagnosis cost by eliminating tests at certain voltage setting using the proposed multivoltage diagnosis approach, thereby achieving high diagnosis accuracy at reduced cost
Workload-Ahead-Driven Online Energy Minimization Techniques for Battery-Powered Embedded Systems with Time-Constraints
No full textThis paper proposes a new online voltage scaling (VS) technique for battery-powered embedded systems with real-time constraints. The VS technique takes into account the tasks execution times and discharge currents to further reduce the battery charge consumption when compared to the recently reported slack forwarding technique, whilst maintaining low online complexity of O(1). Furthermore, we investigate the impact of online rescheduling and remapping on the battery charge consumption for tasks with data dependency which has not been explicitly addressed in the literature and propose a novel rescheduling/remapping technique. We demonstrate and compare the efficiency of the presented techniques using seven real-life benchmarks and numerous automatically generated examples
A Compression-Driven Test Access Mechanism Design Approach
No full textDriven by the industrial need for low-cost test methodologies, the academic community and the industry alike have put forth a number of efficient test data compression (TDC) methods. In addition, the need for core-based System-on-a-Chip (SoC) test led to considerable research in test access mechanism (TAM) design. While most previous work has considered TAM design and TDC independently, this work analyzes the interrelations between the two, outlining that a minimum test time solution obtained using TAM design will not necessarily correspond to a minimum test time solution when compression is applied. This is due to the dependency of some TDC methods on test bus width and care bit density, both of which are related to test time, and hence to TAM design. Therefore, this paper illustrates the importance of considering the characteristics of the compression method when performing TAM design, and it also shows how an existing TAM design method can be enhanced toward a compression-driven solution
Combined Time and Information Redundancy for SEU-Tolerance in Energy-Efficient Real-Time Systems
No full textRecently the trade-off between energy consumption and fault-tolerance in real-time systems has been highlighted. These works have focused on dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) to reduce dynamic energy dissipation and on time redundancy to achieve transient-fault tolerance. While the time redundancy technique exploits the available slack time to increase the fault-tolerance by performing recovery executions, DVS exploits slack time to save energy. Therefore we believe there is a resource conflict between the time-redundancy technique and DVS. The first aim of this paper is to propose the usage of information redundancy to solve this problem. We demonstrate through analytical and experimental studies that it is possible to achieve both higher transient fault-tolerance (tolerance to single event upsets (SEU)) and less energy using a combination of information and time redundancy when compared with using time redundancy alone. The second aim of this paper is to analyze the interplay of transient-fault tolerance (SEU-tolerance) and adaptive body biasing (ABB) used to reduce static leakage energy, which has not been addressed in previous studies. We show that the same technique (i.e. the combination of time and information redundancy) is applicable to ABB-enabled systems and provides more advantages than time redundancy alone
A Fast and Accurate Process Variation-aware Modeling Technique for Resistive Bridge Defects
No full textRecent research has shown that tests generated without taking process variation into account may lead to loss of test quality. At present there is no efficient device-level modeling technique that models the effect of process variation on resistive bridge defects. This paper presents a fast and accurate technique to achieve this, including modeling the effect of voltage and temperature variation using BSIM4 transistor model. To speedup the computation time and without compromising simulation accuracy (achieved through BSIM4) two efficient voltage approximation algorithms are proposed for calculating logic threshold of driven gates and voltages on bridged lines of a fault-site to calculate bridge critical resistance. Experiments are conducted on a 65-nm gate library (for illustration purposes), and results show that on average the proposed modeling technique is more than 53 times faster and in the worst case, error in bridge critical resistance is 2.64% when compared with HSPICE
Low-energy standby-sparing for hard real-time systems
No full textTime-redundancy techniques are commonly used in real-time systems to achieve fault tolerance without incurring high energy overhead. However, reliability requirements of hard real-time systems that are used in safety-critical applications are so stringent that time-redundancy techniques are sometimes unable to achieve them. Standby sparing as a hardware redundancy technique can be used to meet high reliability requirements of safety-critical applications. However, conventional standby-sparing techniques are not suitable for low-energy hard real-time systems as they either impose considerable energy overheads or are not proper for hard timing constraints. In this paper we provide a technique to use standby sparing for hard real-time systems with limited energy budgets. The principal contribution of this work is an online energy management technique which is specifically developed for standby-sparing systems that are used in hard real-time applications. This technique operates at runtime and exploits dynamic slacks to reduce the energy consumption while guaranteeing hard deadlines. We compared the low-energy standby-sparing (LESS) system with a low-energy time redundancy system (from a previous work). The results show that for relaxed time constraints, the LESS system is more reliable and provides about 26% energy saving as compared to the time-redundancy system. For tight deadlines when the time redundancy system is not sufficiently reliable (for safety-critical application), the LESS system preserves its reliability but with about 49% more energy consumptio
Test data compression: The system integrator’s perspective
No full textTest data compression (TDC) is a promising low-cost methodology for System-on-a-Chip (SOC) test. This is due to the fact that it can reduce not only the volume of test data but also the bandwidth requirements. In this paper we provide a quantitative analysis of two distinctive TDC methods from the system integrator’s standpoint considering a core based SOC environment. The proposed analysis addresses four parameters: compression ratio, test application time, area overhead and power dissipation. Based on our analysis, some future research directions are given which can lead to an easier integration of TDC in the SOC design flow and to further improve the four parameters
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