Nicola Nicolici – författare

Minimization of power dissipation in very large scale integrated (VLSI) circuits is important to improve reliability and reduce packaging costs. While many techniques have investigated power minimization during the functional (normal) mode of operation, it is important to examine the power dissipation during the test circuit activity is substantially higher during test than during functional operation. For example, during the execution of built-in self-test (BIST) in-field sessions, excessive power dissipation can decrease the reliability of the circuit under test due to higher temperature and current density.

Power-Constrained Testing of VLSI Circuits focuses on techniques for minimizing power dissipation during test application at logic and register-transfer levels of abstraction of the VLSI design flow. The first part of this book surveys the existing techniques for power constrained testing of VLSI circuits. In the second part, several test automation techniques for reducing power in scan-based sequential circuits and BIST data paths are presented.

Managing the power consumption of circuits and systems is now considered one of the most important challenges for the semiconductor industry. Elaborate power management strategies, such as dynamic voltage scaling, clock gating or power gating techniques, are used today to control the power dissipation during functional operation. The usage of these strategies has various implications on manufacturing test, and power-aware test is therefore increasingly becoming a major consideration during design-for-test and test preparation for low power devices. This book explores existing solutions for power-aware test and design-for-test of conventional circuits and systems, and surveys test strategies and EDA solutions for testing low power devices.