Development Flow for On-Line Core Self-Test of Automotive Microcontrollers

Software-Based Self-Test is an effective methodology for devising the online testing of Systems-on-Chip. In the automotive field, a set of test programs to be run during mission mode is also called Core Self-Test library. This paper introduces many new contributions: (1) it illustrates the several issues that need to be taken into account when generating test programs for on-line execution; (2) it proposed an overall development flow based on ordered generation of test programs that is minimizing the computational efforts; (3) it is providing guidelines for allowing the coexistence of the Core Self-Test library with the mission application while guaranteeing execution robustness. The proposed methodology has been experimented on a large industrial case study. The coverage level reached after one year of team work is over 87 percent of stuck-at fault coverage, and execution time is compliant with the ISO26262 specification. Experimental results suggest that alternative approaches may request excessive evaluation time thus making the generation flow unfeasible for large designs.