Case study of bandwidth management in SoC testing

The system-on-chip (SoC) designs encapsulate many disparate types of complex IP cores. Typically, the SoC test bandwidth (the total input/output scan ports at the SoC boundary) is much smaller than the total input/output scan channels of all cores. To test a SoC with limited test bandwidth, many test bandwidth management technologies are proposed in the past. In this paper, we use a case study to do comparative analysis among several commonly used technologies: (A) static hierarchical bandwidth management without channel sharing, (B) static hierarchical bandwidth management with channel sharing, (C) dynamic hierarchical bandwidth management without channel sharing, and (D) dynamic hierarchical bandwidth management with channel sharing.