Test Selection for Periodic In-field health-check monitoring in fail-safe applications

Systems on chip used in automotive and industrial applications continue to grow in complexity, with many em-bedded processors, memories, and peripheral controllers. Since functional safety of ICs used in these applications is important, periodic in-field testing of the embedded blocks is a necessity. There is a huge number of possibilities for testing the embedded components, such as hardware-enabled BIST, software-enabled BIST, and mutual testing to name a few. In this paper, we consider the problem of selecting an optimal subset of these unit test cases and model it a graph-theoretical optimization problem. We consider the energy dissipation of the test algorithms and the run-time of the test algorithms as two important considerations in the optimization. We propose an exhaustive algorithm as well as a greedy optimization algorithm for the test selection problem.