NVIDIA Corporation
Granular dynamic test systems and methods

Abstract:

In one embodiment, a system comprises: a global clock input for receiving a global clock, a plurality of partitions; and a skew tolerant interface configured to compensate for clock skew differences between a global clock from outside at least one of the partitions and a balanced local clock within at least one of the partitions. The partitions can be test partitions. The skew tolerant interface can cross a mesochronous boundary. In one exemplary implementation, the skew tolerant interface includes a deskew ring buffer on communication path of the at least one partition. pointers associated with the ring buffer can be free-running and depend only on clocks being pulsed when out of reset. The scheme can be fully synchronous and deterministic. The scheme can be modeled for the ATPG tools using simple pipeline flops. The depth of the pipeline can be dependent on the pointer difference for the read/write interface. The global clock input can be part of a scan link.