Power-Aware Testing

Technical Activity Committee on POWER-AWARE TESTING

TAC Chair Patrick GIRARD, girard@lirmm.fr
TAC Co-Chair Xiaoqing WEN, wen@cse.kyutech.ac.jp

Description

Power has become the dominating factor in VLSI design and the biggest driving force in the semiconductor industry. This has made low-power design one of the hottest research and development topics, resulting in a growing number of hardware/software-based techniques for drastically reducing functional power dissipation. However, testing such low-power VLSI circuits has increasingly become a severe challenge. The first reason is that test power can be several times higher than functional power, and excessive test power causes die/package damage due to excessive heat as well as undue yield loss due to excessive power supply noise. The second reason is that a low-power VLSI design contains unconventional structures for power management, which, if not thoroughly tested, will severely compromise product quality. Clearly, low-power VLSI designs cannot be successfully realized without effective and efficient power-aware testing techniques.

Based on this background, the proposed technical activity committee intends to vigorously promote research and development in power-aware testing.

Topics

  • Power analysis
  • Power Safety Checking
  • Power-Aware Test Generation
  • Power-Aware DFT
  • Power-Aware BIST
  • Power-Aware Test Data Compression
  • Fault Diagnosis and Silicon Debug of Low-Power Designs
  • Test of Multi-Voltage Designs
  • Test of Gated-Clock Designs
  • Test of Power-Management Structures
  • System-Level Power-Aware Test Scheduling
  • Power-Aware On-Line Testing
  • Power-Aware 3D Testing
  • Power-Aware Fault Tolerance
  • Power-Aware FPGA Testing
  • IP with Embedded Power-Aware Test Infrastructure

Related Books

Related Books

  • Power-Aware Testing and Test Strategies for Low Power Devices (Springer, New York, 2009)

Related Journals

  • IEEE Design & Test of Computers
  • Most of IEEE Transactions journals (TVLSI, TC, TCAD, TODAES, …)

Related Events

  • LPonTR (IEEE Int’l Workshop on the Impact of Low-Power Design on Test and Reliability)
  • DATE (Conference on Design, Automation and Test in Europe)
    2008 (Hot Topic Session: Test Challenges for Low Power Devices)
  • VTS (VLSI Test Symposium)
    2010 (Panel: Low-Power Test and Noise-Aware Test: Foes or Friends?)
  • ATS (Asian Test Symposium)
    2009 (Panel: Is Low Power Testing Necessary? What does the Test Industry Truly Need?)
  • IGCC-WS (International Green Conference on Computing – Low-Power SoC Workshop)
    2011 (Special Session on Low-Power Testing)
  • WRTLT (International Workshop on RTL and High Level Testing)
    2008 (Panel: Roads to Power-Safe LSI Testing)
  • ITC (International Test Conference), ETS (European Test Symposium)
    Numerous regular sessions on this topic
  • Tutorials:
    • Power-Aware Testing and Test Strategies for Low Power Devices (DATE’08, ITC’09, ATS’09, LATW’10, NEWCAS’10, MWSCAS’ 10, ICM’10, DATE’11, ITC’11)
    • Power Issues in Test (ETS’07)

Upcoming conferences and symposia

IEEE VLSI Test Symposium 2024
Paper registration: October 9, 2023
Paper PDF upload: October 15, 2023
Questions to authors: December 9, 2023
Submission of rebuttal: December 14, 2023
Notification: December 23, 2023
Camera-ready upload: February 03, 2024

ITC 2023
Paper title/abstract due: March 20, 2023 extended to April 3, 2023
Paper final PDF due: April 3, 2023 extended to April 17, 2023
Author notification: June 12, 2023 delayed until June 23, 2023
Final manuscript due: July 17, 2023
Authors are also invited to submit a single-page poster prop

IOLTS 2023
Title and Abstract registration: March 23, 2023
Paper submission: March 27, 2023
Notification of acceptance: May 10, 2023
Camera Ready: June 07, 2023

19th IEEE Workshop on Silicon Errors in Logic – System Effects (SELSE) 2023
Paper registration: December 23, 2022
Paper submission: January 9, 2023

IEEE European Test Symposium 2023
Title+Abstract: December 9, 2022
Paper: December 16, 2022

DATE 2023
Title+abstract: September 18, 2022 (AoE)
Paper: September 25, 2022 (AoE)

IEEE Asian Test Symposium 2022
Abstract & Full Paper Submission Deadline: July 1st, 2022 (AoE)

ITC India 2022
Abstract & Full Paper Submission Deadline: May 9th, 2022

LATS 2022
Title+abstract: May 6, 2022
Paper: May 13, 2022