Evolutionary Techniques for Minimizing Test Signals Application Time

Reducing production-test application time is a key problem for modern industries. Several different hardware solutions have been proposed in the literature to ease such process. However, each hardware architecture must be coupled with an effective test signals generation algorithm. This paper propose an evolutionary approach for minimizing the application time of a test set by opportunely extending it and exploiting a new hardware architecture, named interleaved scan. The peculiarities of the problem suggest the use of a slightly modified genetic algorithm with concurrent populations. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the approach against the traditional ones.