Test Architecture for Systolic Array of Edge-Based AI Accelerator

Abstract

The application diversity and evolution of AI accelerator architectures require innovative DFT solutions to address issues such as test time, test power, performance and area overhead. Full scan DFT, because of its enhanced controllability and observability, is an industrial de facto test strategy. However, it may not yield an optimal test solution with stringent design constraints of edge-based AI accelerators. In this paper, a novel test architecture based on selective-partial scan is proposed for performance, power and area (PPA) overhead constrained edge-based systolic AI accelerator. In this architecture, the structural test patterns are applied partly in functional manner, which reduces the testability problem of an array to that of a single processing element (PE); thus, resulting in reduced test time and test data volume. Moreover, a delay fault testing method based on Launch-on-Capture is presented for the partial scan based proposed architecture. Experimental results show that proposed architecture is efficient in terms of test power and test time when compared to full scan DFT.