Software-Based Test Methodology for Fully Associative Data Cache

• Main Authors: Hung-Min Hsu, 許宏銘
• Other Authors: Kuen-Jong Lee
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2006
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/05938144834249030372

碩士 === 國立成功大學 === 電機工程學系碩博士班 === 94 === The testing problem of caches in a processor may be addressed using the built-in self-test (BIST) or design-for-test (DFT) techniques. However, the insertion of test circuits required by these techniques would adversely affect the performance of the cache. Hence, the software-based test methodology which uses processor resources to self test the components in the processor is often used for high performance consideration. Previous software-based test schemes mainly deal with the direct-mapped and set associative caches. The testing of the fully associative data cache has seldom been discussed. In this thesis, we propose a novel software-based test methodology for both memory arrays and control logic in the fully associative data cache. For the memory arrays, our main focus is on the content-addressable memory (CAM) that have been used as the tag RAM of the cache and its software-based test issue has not been addressed previously. We shall propose a software-based test method that can achieve very high test quality for the CAM. For the control logic, a systematic approach to develop functional test sequences for various cache functions is proposed. The developed test sequences are shown to be able to comprehensively test the control logic in a fully associative data cache.