Vlsi Test Program Verification And Its Supporting Environment - Theory, Method And Practice

With the unceasingly improvement of integration, speed and performance of VLSI devices, ATE is expected to have high reliability, strong adaptability and low cost as well as high performance. As an important component of a test system, the quality of test software has critical influence on the capability of ATE hardware. To meet the increasing requirement for efficient test software, a Software System project was started up as a sub-system of National Eighth-Five Year Sci-Tech Program Large Scale Test System, aimed at providing a Test Software System (TeSS) for the tester BC3190, which is the background of the research and practice of this dissertation.The thesis discusses the problem of integrity for test — as a kind of safety critical system, the test equipment needs some degree of proof to assure the reliability of test and safety of the system. Verification of test programs (including static verification and dynamic verification) is an effective approach to enhancing integrity for test. Since the verification of test programs is a rule based application, thus the architecture of the rule based production system can be adopted in the implementation. However, test rules are time-effective knowledge, which request a knowledge expression method capable of expressing sequence relations, Sequential Production, a paradigm of conventional production, is presented in the thesis to describe all kinds of test rules, and decrease the coupling between the knowledge expression and the inference mechanism, thus being suitable for the asynchronous inference. Asynchronous inference operates the external knowledge ( fact) acquisition and complex rule firing asynchronously, therefore is appropriate for the simulation execution way of verifying test programs described in the thesis by solving the problem of real-time reasoning in dynamic knowledge systems such as realtime systems and time sensitive systems. The experiments of verification of sample test programs show that the test program verification tool based on sequential production knowledge expression and asynchronous inference has better performance and more rapid process speed, in relation to the implementation method based on conventional production system, hence the method employed in the thesis is reasonable and feasible. Effectively proceeding error detection in advance of the on-line execution of test programs, the verification tool is significant to the safety of the entire test system.To compose Verifier and other application tools in the software environment of TeSS to a powerful support system TSDVE — Test Software Development and Verification Environment, a solution of software systems integration is...