A multi-purpose digital test core utilizing programmable logic has been introduced [1,2] to implement many of the functions of traditional automated test equipment (ATE). While previous papers have described the theory, this paper quantifies the results and presents additional applications with improved methods. The digital test core provides a substantial number of programmable I/O for testing...

A compression/decompression scheme based on statistical coding is presented for reducing the amount of test data that must be stored on a tester and transferred to each core in a core-based design. The test vectors provided by the core vendor are stored in compressed form in the tester memory and transferred to the chip where they are decompressed and applied to the core. Given the set of test ...