Visiting Graduate Student from France

My name is Christophe Paoli, and I’m a Ph.D. student at the University of Corsica (France). I was invited by the Department of the Electrical and Computer at UNH as a "J" exchange visitor for a period of three months. My responsibilities included conducting research under the supervision of Dr. Andrzej Rucinski in the area of design for testability and design validation of microelectronic systems. I was involved in a VLSI project titled: "Overview of Test Methods using Boundary Scan". The framework of this project was a digital circuit: a counter/shift register. My work can be divided into two main parts.

The first part was to describe, using the VHDL language, this circuit and the different structures used to test it. Built-In Self-Test structures (Linear Feedback Shift Registesr, Multi Input Signature Registers, BIST controllers) and Boundary Scan structures (Instruction Registers, Data Registers, Test Access Port controller, etc.) were considered. I used Mentor Graphic’s ModelSIM EE to compile and simulate these behavioral descriptions.

The second part of my work was to synthesize, using Mentor’s Leonardo tool, the VHDL code in order to obtain a gate level description of the complete system. Furthermore, I used different Mentor Graphic tools such as Design Architecture, QuickSimII, Flextest, Fastscan, etc. in order to improve my knowledge on the gate level domain.

I want to thank Professor and Chair Dr. John LaCourse for inviting me to his Department and particularly Dr. Andrzej Rucinski as the initiator and the supervisor of this exchange. I want also to thank Frank Hludik for his consulting help, as well as the members for the design team: Roman Kozakowski and David Saarinen. Finally, I thank all the members of the ECE Department at UNH for their cordiality.