US Patent 7505862 Apparatus and method for testing electronic systems

The technology and economics of system testing have evolved to the point where a radical change in methodology is needed for effective functional testing of systems at clock rates of 1 GHz and higher. Rather than providing a test fixture to interface between the system under test and an external tester, it is preferable to provide critical testing functions within each electronic system in the form of one or more special-purpose test chips. An architecture is proposed that supports full-speed testing with improved noise margins, and also efficient methods for learning correct system behavior and generating the test vectors. The test program is preferably written using the same programming language as used for the system application.