Testing methods for detecting stuck-open power switches in coarse-grain MTCMOS designs

Coarse-grain multi-threshold CMOS (MTCMOS) is an effective power-gating technique to reduce IC's leakage power consumption by turning off idle devices with MTCMOS power switches. In this paper, we study the usage of coarse-grain MTCMOS power switches for both logic circuits and SRAMs, and then propose corresponding methods of testing stuck-open power switches for each of them. For logic circuits, a specialized ATPG framework is proposed to generate a longest possible robust test while creating as many effective transitions in the switch-centered region as possible. For SRAMs, a novel test algorithm is proposed to exercise the worstcase power consumption and performance when stuck-open power switches exist. The experimental results based on an industrial MTCMOS technology demonstrate the advantage of our proposed testing methods on detecting stuck-open power switches for both logic circuits and SRAMs, when compared to conventional testing methods.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: ICCAD
• Authors: Szu-Pang Mu, Yi-Ming Wang, Hao-Yu Yang, Mango Chia-Tso Chao, Shi-Hao Chen, Chih-Mou Tseng, Tsung-Ying Tsai
• Keywords: Hardware, ICCAD 2010, MTCMOS Power, Power Consumption, Stuck-open Power