A novel test access mechanism for parallel testing of multi-core system

The increased usages of multi-core systems diminish percore complexity and also demand several parallel design and test technologies. This paper introduces a novel test access mechanism (TAM) for parallel testing of multiple identical cores. Instead of typical test response data from the cores, the test output data used in this paper are the majority values extracted from the typical test response from the cores. All the cores can be tested in parallel and test costs (test time, test pins) are exactly the same as for a single core. The experiment results in this paper show the proposed TAM can test multiple cores with minimal test pins and test time and with negligible hardware overhead.