published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Electrical and Electronic Engineering / Master / Master of Philosophy

No description available.

published_or_final_version / Electrical and Electronic Engineering / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Not available / text

The concept of Built-In Self-Test (BIST) has recently become an increasingly attractive solution to the complex problem of testing VLSI chips. However, the realization of BIST faces some challenging problems of its own. One of these problems is to increase the quality of fault coverage of a BIST implementation, without incurring a large overhead. In particular, the loss of information in the output data compressor, which is typically a multi-input linear feedback shift register (MISR), is a major cause of concern. / In the recent past, several researchers have proposed different schemes to reduce this loss of information, while maintaining the need for a small area overhead. / In this dissertation, a new BIST scheme, based on modifying the output data before compression, is developed. This scheme, called output data modification (ODM), exploits the knowledge of the functionality of the circuit under test to provide a circuit-specific BIST structure. This structure is developed so that it can conveniently be implemented for any general circuit under consideration. But more importantly, a proof of effectiveness is provided to show that ODM will, on the average, be orders of magnitude better than all existing schemes in its capability to reduce the information loss, for a given amount of area overhead. / Moreover, the constructive nature of the proof will allow one to provide a simple trade-off between the reduction tolerated in information loss to the area overhead needed to affect this reduction.

No description available.