Thesis--Auburn University, 2009. / Abstract. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 58-62).

Dėl didėjančio integrinių schemų sudėtingumo ir darbinių dažnių vėlinimo gedimų nustatymas tampa svarbia schemų kūrimo dalimi. Programiniai schemų prototipai leidžia atlikti schemų testavimą ankstyvojoje stadijoje. Šiame darbe yra pateikiama vėlinimo gedimų nustatymo metodų analizė ir jų palyginimas. Tyrimo objektu pasirinktas perėjimo gedimų modelis. Dokumente aprašomas AntiRandom metodo pritaikymo galimybės funkcinių testų generavimui. Taip pat yra trumpai apžvelgiami egzistuojantys sprendimai rinkoje. Projektavimo skyriuje yra aprašoma suprojektuota ir realizuota sistema, kuri susideda iš dviejų posistemių: funkcinių testų generatoriaus bei rezultatų kaupimo ir analizės posistemės. Funkcinių testų generatoriuje realizuoti du atsitiktinio ir AntiRandom metodai. Paskutinėje dokumento dalyje yra pateiktas atliktas eksperimentinis tyrimas su realizuota sistema. Taip pat yra pateikiami eksperimentinio tyrimo metu pasiekti rezultatai bei padarytos viso darbo išvados. / The increasing complexity of integrated circuits and operating frequency led delay fault identification to become an important part of the schemes development. Software prototypes allow to start testing phase at an early stage. This work covers the delay fault detection method analysis and comparison. For the study is selected transition fault identification. The paper describes the AntiRandom method and customization possibilities for the functional test generation. There is also a brief overview of an existing solutions on the market. The design section describes the designed and implemented system which consists of two subsystems: functional tests generator and results storage and analysis subsystem. Functional test generator has two random methods and customized AntiRandom method. The last part of the document covers an experimental study for the created system. It consists of results of the experiments and conclusions of the whole work.

With rapid advancement in science and technology and decreasing feature size of transistors, the complexity of VLSI designs is constantly increasing. With increasing density and complexity of the designs, the probability of occurrence of defects also increases. Therefore testing of designs becomes essential in order to guarantee fault-free operation of devices. Testing of VLSI designs involves generation of test patterns, test pattern application and identification of defects in design. In case of scan based designs, the test set size directly impacts the test application time which is determined by the number of memory elements in the design and the test storage requirements. There are various methods in literature which are used to address the issue of large test set size classified as static or dynamic compaction methods depending on whether the test compaction algorithm is performed as a post-processing step after test generation or is integrated within the test generation. In general, there is a trade-off between the test compaction achievable and the run-time. Methods which are computationally intensive might provide better compaction, however, might have longer run times owing to the complexity of the algorithm. In the first part of the thesis we address the problem of large test set size in partially scanned designs by proposing an incremental dynamic compaction method. Typically, the fault coverage curve of designs ramp up very quickly in the beginning and later slows down and ultimately the curve flattens towards the tail of the curve. In the initial phase of test generation a greedy compaction method is used because initially there are easy-to-detect faults and the scope for compaction is better. However, in the later portion of the curve, there are hard-to-detect faults which affect compaction and we propose to use a dynamic compaction approach. We propose a novel mechanism to identify redundant faults during dynamic compaction to avoid targeting them later. The effectiveness of method is demonstrated on industrial designs and test size reduction of 30% is achieved. As the device complexity is increasing, delay defects are also increasing. Speed path debug is necessary in order to meet performance requirements. Speed paths are the frequency limiting paths in a design identified during debug. Speed paths can be tested using functional patterns, transition n-detect patterns or path delay patterns. However, usage of functional patterns for speed path debug is expensive because generation of functional patterns is expensive and the application cost is also high because the number of patterns is large and requires functional testers. In the second part of the dissertation we propose a simple path sensitization approach that can be used to generate pseudo-robust tests, which are near robust tests and can be used for designs that have multiple clock domains. The fault coverage for path delay fault APTG can be further improved by dividing the paths that are not testable under pseudo robust conditions, into shorter sub-paths. The effectiveness of the method is demonstrated on industrial designs.

<p>Timing-related defects are becoming increasingly important in nanometer-technology integrated circuits (ICs). Small delay variations induced by crosstalk, process variations, power-supply noise, as well as resistive opens and shorts can potentially cause timing failures in a design, thereby leading to quality and reliability concerns. All these effects are noticeable in today's technologies and they are likely to become more prominent in the next-generation process technologies~\cite{itrs2007}.</p><p>The detection of small-delay defects (SDDs) is difficult because of the small size of the introduced delay. Although the delay introduced by each SDD is small, the overall impact can be significant if the target path is critical, has low slack, or includes many SDDs. The overall delay of the path may become larger than the clock period, causing circuit failure or temporarily incorrect results. As a result, the detection of SDDs typically requires fault excitation through least-slack paths. However, widely-used automatic test-pattern generation (ATPG) techniques are not effective at exciting small delay defects. On the other hand, the usage of commercially available timing-aware tools is expensive in terms of pattern count inflation and very high test-generation times. Furthermore, these tools do not target real physical defects.</p><p>SDDs are induced not only by physical defects, but also by run-time variations such as crosstalk and power-supply noise. These variations are ignored by today's commercial ATPG tools. As a result, new methods are required for comprehensive coverage of SDDs.</p><p>Test data volume and test application time are also major concerns for large industrial circuits. In recent years, many compression techniques have been proposed and evaluated using industrial designs. However, these methods do not target sequence- or timing-dependent failures while compressing the test patterns. Since timing-related failures in high-performance integrated circuits are now increasingly dominated by SDDs, it is necessary to develop timing-aware compression techniques.</p><p>This thesis addresses the problem of selecting the most effective test patterns for detecting SDDs. A new gate and interconnect delay-defect probability measure is defined to model delay variations for nanometer technologies. The proposed technique intelligently selects the best set of patterns for SDD detection from a large pattern set generated using timing-unaware ATPG. It offers significantly lower computational complexity and it excites a larger number of long paths compared to previously proposed timing-aware ATPG methods. It is shown that, for the same pattern count, the selected patterns are more effective than timing-aware ATPG for detecting small delay defects caused by resistive shorts, resistive opens, process variations, and crosstalk. The proposed technique also serves as the basis for an efficient SDD-aware test compression scheme. The effectiveness of the proposed technique is highlighted for industrial circuits.</p><p>In summary, this research is targeted at the testing of SDDs caused by various underlying reasons. The proposed techniques are expected to generate high-quality and compact test patterns for various types of defects in nanometer ICs. The results of this research are expected to provide low-cost and effective test methods for nanometer devices, and they will lead to higher shipped-product quality.</p> / Dissertation

Process variations is one of the most challenging phenomena in deep submicron. Delay fault testing becomes more complicated because gate delays are not fixed but instead, they are statistical quantities due to the variations in the transistor characteristics. On the other hand, testing for hardware Trojan is also challenging in the presence of process variations because it can easily mask the impact of the inserted Trojan. This work consists of two parts. In the first part, an approach to detect ultra-low-power no-payload Trojans by analyzing IDDT waveforms at each gate in the presence of process variations is presented. The approach uses a novel ATPG to insert a small number of current sensors to analyze the behavior of individual gates at the IDDT waveform. The second part focuses on identifying a test set that maximizes the defect coverage for path delay fault. The proposed approach utilizes Monte-Carlo simulation efficiently and uses a machine-learning algorithm to select a small test set with high detect coverage.

Delay variability poses a formidable challenge in both design and test of nanometer circuits. While process parameter variability is increasing with technology scaling, as circuits are becoming more complex, the dynamic or vector dependent variability is also increasing steadily. In this research, we develop solutions to incorporate the effect of delay variability in delay testing. We focus on two different applications of delay testing. In the first case, delay testing is used for testing the timing performance of a circuit using path based fault models. We show that if dynamic delay variability is not accounted for during the path selection phase, then it can result in targeting a wrong set of paths for test. We have developed efficient techniques to model the effect of two different dynamic effects namely multiple-input switching noise and coupling noise. The basic strategy to incorporate the effect of dynamic delay variability is to estimate the maximum vector delay of a path without being too pessimistic. In the second case, the objective was to increase the defect coverage of reliability defects in the presence of process variations. Such defects cause very small delay changes and hence can easily escape regular tests. We develop a circuit that facilitates accurate control over the capture edge and thus enable faster than at-speed testing. We further develop an efficient path selection algorithm that can select a path that detects the smallest detectable defect at any node in the presence of process variations. / text

Projekto tikslas – sukurti sistemą, skirtą schemų testinių atvejų atrinkimui naudojant „juodos dėžės“ modelius ir jiems pritaikytus gedimų modelius. Vykdant projektą buvo atlikta kūrino būdų ir technologijų analizė. Sistemos architektūra buvo kuriama atsižvelgiant į reikalavimą, naudoti schemų modelius, kurie yra parašyti c programavimo kalba. Buvo atlikta schemų failų integravimo efektyvumo analizė, tiriamos atsitiktinio testinių atvejų generavimo sekos patobulinimo galimybės, "1" pasiskirstymo 5taka atsitiktinai generuojam7 testini7 atvej7 kokybei. Tyrim7 rezultatai: • Schemų modelių integracijos tipas mažai įtakoja sistemos darbą. • Pusiau deterministinių metodų taikymas parodė, jog atskirų žingsnių optimizacija nepagerina galutinio rezultato. • "1" pasiskirstymas atsitiktinai generuojamose sekose turi įtaką testo kokybei ir gali būti naudojamas testų procesų pagerinimui. / Project objective – to develop a system, which generates functional tests for non-scan synchronous sequential circuits based on functional delay models. During project execution, the analysis of design and technology solutions was performed. The architecture of the developed software is based on the requirement to be able to use the models of the benchmark circuits that are written in C programming language. Analysis of the effectiveness of the model file integration, possibilities of improving random test sequence generation and the influence of distribution of „1“ in randomly generated test patterns was performed. The results of the analysis were: • Type of the model file integration has little effect when using large circuit models. • The implementation of semi deterministic algorithms showed that the optimisation of separate steps by construction of test subsequences doesn’t improve the final outcome. • The distribution of „1“ in randomly generated test patterns has effect on the fault coverage and can be used to improve test generation process.