Alan Hales

A serially addressable, flexible current monitor for test fixture based I/sub DDQ//I/sub SSQ/ testing

The Quality Test Action Group (QTAG) was formed at the 1993 International Test Conference to define a standard for test fixture based off-chip quiescent current monitors for use in the production testing of CMOS integrated circuits. These quiescent current monitors will provide the I/sub DDQ//I/sub SSQ/ test instrumentation that is needed by the semiconductor industry. This paper proposes a standard serial interface to be used by ATE systems to communicate with the QTAG quiescent current monitors.

A 1.25GHz 0.8W C66x DSP Core in 40nm CMOS

The next-generation C66x DSP integrated fixed and floating-point DSP implemented in TSMC 40nm process is presented in this paper. The DSP core runs at 1.25GHz at 0.9V and has a standby power consumption of 800mW. The core transistor count is 21.5 million. The DSP core features 8-way VLIW floating point Data path and a two level memory system and delivers 40 GMACS or 10 GFLOPS floating point MAC performance at 1.25GHz.

Towards effective and compression-friendly test of memory interface logic

Cost and time-to-market considerations are strongly driving the need to improve the effectiveness of structural patterns for speed/voltage binning. In this paper we focus on improving the quality of testing memory interface paths for speed/voltage-binning. We propose DFT schemes that propagate faults through the memory that are effective with test compression. We also propose memory architectural enhancements to improve the effectiveness of ATPG patterns for Fmax identification. Both synchronous and asynchronous memories are targeted. Experimental results on an industrial ASIC core show the effectiveness of the proposed schemes with test compression. Initial silicon results from a 40-nm testchip is also presented and it proves that Fmax using the proposed scheme is very close to that of functional patterns, while Fmax using conventional schemes are more than 2X higher than that of functional patterns.