Temperature-aware software-based self-testing for delay faults

Delay defects under high temperature have been one of the most critical factors to affect the reliability of computer systems, and the current test methods don't address this problem properly. In this paper, a temperature-aware software-based self-testing (SBST) technique is proposed to self-heat the processors within a high temperature range and effectively test delay faults under high temperature. First, it automatically generates high-quality test programs through automatic test instruction generation (ATIG), and avoids over-testing caused by nonfunctional patterns. Second, it exploits two effective power-intensive program transformations to self-heat up the processors internally. Third, it applies a greedy algorithm to search the optimized schedule of the test templates in order to generate the test program while making sure that the temperature of the processor under test is within the specified range. Experimental results show that the generated program is successful to guarantee delay test within the given temperature range, and achieves high test performance with functional patterns.