8CS4.1 Hardware Testing and Fault Tolerance (Comp. Engg.) |
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| Units | Contents of the subjects |
| Overview of hardware testing. Reliability and Testing, Difference between Verification and Testing, Concepts of fault models, test pattern generation and fault coverage. Types of tests – exhaustive testing, pseudo-exhaustive testing, pseudo-random testing, and deterministic testing. Test Application. Design for Test. Testing Economics. Defects, Failures and Faults. How are physical defects modeled as faults. Stuck-at faults, Single stuck-at-faults multiple stuck-at faults, bridging faults, delay faults, transient faults. | |
| Relation between VLSI Design and Testing. a) Design Representation for the purpose of testing – Representation in the form of mathematical equations, tabular format, graphs, Binary Decision Diagrams, Netlists, or HDL descriptions. b) Recap of VLSI Design Flow and where testing fits in the flow. Importance of Simulation and Fault Simulation. Compiled and event-driven simulation. Parallel and deductive fault simulation. Using fault simulation to estimate fault coverage and building a fault dictionary | |
| Combinational Test Pattern Generation. D-algorithm. Critical Path Tracking. PODEM algorithm for test generation. Testing sequential circuits. Functional and deterministic ATPG for sequential circuits and the associated challenges. Motivation for Design for Testability. Test Points, Partitioning for Testability. Scan Testing. Scan Architectures. Cost of Scan Testing. Boundary Scan Testing. Board-level testing. Boundary-scan Architecture and various modes of operation. | |
| a) Built-in Self Test. Pseudo-random test generation. Response Compaction. Random pattern-resistant faults. BIST architectures – Circular BIST, BILBO, STUMPS. b) Testing of Memories – Fault models, Functional tests for memories, Memory BIST. c) Testing of microprocessors. | |
| Hardware fault tolerance. Failure Rate, Reliability, Mean Time to Failure. Different kinds of redundancy schemes for fault-tolerance (Space, Time, and Information Redundancy). Nmodular Redundancy. Watch Dog Processors, Byzantine Failures. Information Redundancy – parity codes, checksums, m-of-n codes. RAID architectures for disk storage systems. Fault tolerance in interconnection networks. Fault-tolerant routing techniques. | |
Text/References:
1. Samiha Mourad and Yervant Zorian. Principles of Electronic Systems. Wiley Student
Editon. [Available in Indian Edition].
2. Koren and C. Mani Krishna. Fault-Tolerant Systems. Elsevier. (Indian Edition Available.)