Delay faults are an increasingly important test challenge. Traditional delay fault models are incomplete in that they model only a subset of delay defect behaviors. To solve this problem, a more realistic delay fault model has been developed which models delay faults caused by the combination of spot defects and parametric process variation. According to the new model, a realistic delay fault coverage metric has been developed. Traditional path delay fault coverage metrics result in unrealistically low fault coverage, and the real test quality is not reflected. The new metric uses a statistical approach and the simulation based fault coverage is consistent with silicon data. Fast simulation algorithms are also included in this dissertation. The new metric suggests that testing the K longest paths per gate (KLPG) has high detection probability for small delay faults under process variation. In this dissertation, a novel automatic test pattern generation (ATPG) methodology to find the K longest testable paths through each gate for both combinational and sequential circuits is presented. Many techniques are used to reduce search space and CPU time significantly. Experimental results show that this methodology is efficient and able to handle circuits with an exponential number of paths, such as ISCAS85 benchmark circuit c6288. The ATPG methodology has been implemented on industrial designs. Speed binning has been done on many devices and silicon data has shown significant benefit of the KLPG test, compared to several traditional delay test approaches.

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Tests for detecting faults in analog and mixed-signal circuits have been traditionally derived from the datasheet speci and #64257;cations. Although these speci and #64257;cations describe important aspects of the device, in many cases these application oriented tests are costly to implement and are inefficient in determining product quality. Increasingly, the gap between speci and #64257;cation test requirements and the capabilities of test equipment has been widening. In this work, a systematic method to generate and evaluate alternate tests for detecting parametric faults is proposed. We recognize that certain aspects of analog test generation problem are not amenable to automation. Additionally, functional features of analog circuits are widely varied and cannot be assumed by the test generator. To overcome these problems, an extended device under test (DUT) model is developed that encapsulates the DUT and the DUT speci and #64257;c tasks. The interface of this model provides a well de and #64257;ned and uniform view of a large class of devices. This permits several simpli and #64257;cations in the test generator. The test generator is uses a search-based procedure that requires evaluation of a large number of candidate tests. Test evaluation is expensive because of complex fault models and slow fault simulation techniques. A tester-resident test evaluation technique is developed to address this issue. This method is not limited by simulation complexity nor does it require an explicit fault model. Making use of these two developments, an efficient and automated test generation method is developed. Theoretical development and a number of examples are used to illustrate various concepts that are presented in this thesis.

With the advances in very large scale integration (VLSI) technology, hardware is going parallel. Software, which was traditionally designed to execute on single core microprocessors, now faces the tough challenge of taking advantage of this parallelism, made available by the scaling of hardware. The work presented in this dissertation studies the acceleration of electronic design automation (EDA) software on several hardware platforms such as custom integrated circuits (ICs), field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and graphics processors. This dissertation concentrates on a subset of EDA algorithms which are heavily used in the VLSI design flow, and also have varying degrees of inherent parallelism in them. In particular, Boolean satisfiability, Monte Carlo based statistical static timing analysis, circuit simulation, fault simulation and fault table generation are explored. The architectural and performance tradeoffs of implementing the above applications on these alternative platforms (in comparison to their implementation on a single core microprocessor) are studied. In addition, this dissertation also presents an automated approach to accelerate uniprocessor code using a graphics processing unit (GPU). The key idea is to partition the software application into kernels in an automated fashion, such that multiple instances of these kernels, when executed in parallel on the GPU, can maximally benefit from the GPU?s hardware resources. The work presented in this dissertation demonstrates that several EDA algorithms can be successfully rearchitected to maximally harness their performance on alternative platforms such as custom designed ICs, FPGAs and graphic processors, and obtain speedups upto 800X. The approaches in this dissertation collectively aim to contribute towards enabling the computer aided design (CAD) community to accelerate EDA algorithms on arbitrary hardware platforms.

Scan Chains in DFT has gained more prominence in recent years due to the increase in the complexity of the sequential circuits. As the test time increases along with the number of memory elements in the circuit, new and improved methods came in to prominence. Even though scan chain increases observability and controllability, a big portion of the time is wasted while shifting in and shifting out the test patterns through the scan chain. This thesis focus on reducing the number of clock cycles that are needed to test the circuit. The proposed Algorithm uses modified shift procedures based on 1) Finding hard to detect faults in the circuit. 2) Productive way to generate test patterns for the combinational blocks in between the flip flops. 3) Rearranging test patterns and changing the shift procedures to achieve fault coverage in reduced number of clock cycles. In this model, the selection process is based on calculating the fault value of a fault and total fault value of the vector which is used to find the hard faults and the order in which the vectors are applied. This method reduces the required number of shifts for detecting the faults and thereby reducing the testing time. This thesis concentrates on appropriate utilization of scan chains for testing the sequential circuits. In this context, the proposed method shows promising results in reduction of the number of shifts, thereby reducing the test time. The experimental results are based on the widely cited ISCAS 89 benchmark circuits.

With the advances of very large scale integration (VLSI) technology, the feature size has been shrinking steadily together with the increase in the design complexity of logic circuits. As a result, the efforts taken for designing, testing, and debugging digital systems have increased tremendously. Although the electronic design automation (EDA) algorithms have been studied extensively to accelerate such processes, some computational intensive applications still take long execution times. This is especially the case for testing and validation. In order tomeet the time-to-market constraints and also to come up with a bug-free design or product, the work presented in this dissertation studies the acceleration of EDA algorithms on Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). This dissertation concentrates on a subset of EDA algorithms related to testing and validation. In particular, within the area of testing, fault simulation, diagnostic simulation and reliability analysis are explored. We also investigated the approaches to parallelize state justification on GPUs, which is one of the most difficult problems in the validation area. Firstly, we present an efficient parallel fault simulator, FSimGP2, which exploits the high degree of parallelism supported by a state-of-the-art graphic processing unit (GPU) with the NVIDIA Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA). A novel three-dimensional parallel fault simulation technique is proposed to achieve extremely high computation efficiency on the GPU. The experimental results demonstrate a speedup of up to 4Ã compared to another GPU-based fault simulator. Then, another GPU based simulator is used to tackle an even more computation-intensive task, diagnostic fault simulation. The simulator is based on a two-stage framework which exploits high computation efficiency on the GPU. We introduce a fault pair based approach to alleviate the limited memory capacity on GPUs. Also, multi-fault-signature and dynamic load balancing techniques are introduced for the best usage of computing resources on-board. With continuously feature size scaling and advent of innovative nano-scale devices, the reliability analysis of the digital systems becomes more important nowadays. However, the computational cost to accurately analyze a large digital system is very high. We proposes an high performance reliability analysis tool on GPUs. To achieve highmemory bandwidth on GPUs, two algorithms for simulation scheduling and memory arrangement are proposed. Experimental results demonstrate that the parallel analysis tool is efficient, reliable and scalable. In the area of design validation, we investigate state justification. By employing the swarm intelligence and the power of parallelism on GPUs, we are able to efficiently find a trace that could help us reach the corner cases during the validation of a digital system. In summary, the work presented in this dissertation demonstrates that several applications in the area of digital design testing and validation can be successfully rearchitected to achieve maximal performance on GPUs and obtain significant speedups. The proposed algorithms based on GPU parallelism collectively aim to contribute to improving the performance of EDA tools in Computer aided design (CAD) community on GPUs and other many-core platforms. / Ph. D.

This research investigates an important class of hardware attacks against embedded software, which uses fault injection as a hacking tool. Fault attacks use well-chosen, targeted fault injection combined with clever system response analysis to break the security of a system. In case of a fault attack on embedded software, faults are injected into the underlying processor hardware and their effects are observed in the executed software's output. This introduces an additional difficulty in mitigation of fault attack risk. Designing efficient countermeasures requires first understanding software, instruction-set, and hardware level components of fault attacks, and then, systematically addressing the vulnerabilities at each level. This research first proposes an instruction fault sensitivity model to capture effects of fault injection on embedded software. Based on the instruction fault sensitivity model, a novel fault attack method called MAFIA (Micro-architecture Aware Fault Injection Attack) is also introduced. MAFIA exploits the vulnerabilities in multiple abstraction layers. This enables an adversary to determine best points to attack during the execution as well as pinpoint the desired fault effects. It has been shown that MAFIA breaks the existing countermeasures with significantly fewer fault injections than the traditional fault attacks. Another contribution of the research is a fault attack simulator, MESS (Micro-architectural Embedded System Simulator). MESS enables a user to model hardware, instruction-set, and software level components of fault attacks in a simulation environment. Thus, software designers can use MESS to evaluate their programs against several real-world fault attack scenarios. The final contribution of this research is the fault-attack-resistant FAME (Fault-attack Aware Microprocessor Extensions) processor, which is suited for embedded, constrained systems. FAME combines fault detection in hardware and fault response in software. This allows low-cost, performance-efficient, flexible, and backward-compatible integration of hardware and software techniques to mitigate fault attack risk. FAME has been designed as an architectural concept as well as implemented as a chip prototype. In addition to protection mechanisms, the chip prototype also includes fault injection and analysis features to ease fault attack research. The findings of this research indicate that considering multiple abstraction layers together is essential for efficient fault attacks, countermeasures, and evaluation techniques. / Ph. D.

Este trabalho apresenta uma plataforma e uma técnica para o melhoramento da eficiência da graduação de falhas stuck-at de padrões de teste através do uso de co-emulação de hardware. Os fabricantes de Circuitos Integrados continuamente buscam novas formas de testar seus dispositivos com o intuito de distribuir peças sem defeitos aos seus clientes. Scan é uma técnica bem conhecida que consegue alta cobertura de falhas com eficiência. As demandas por novos recursos motivam a criação de sistemas complexos que fazem uso de uma mistura de blocos analógicos e digitais com uma interface de comunicação, difícil de ser coberta pelos padrões de scan. Adicionalmente, a lógica que configura o chip para cada um dos diferentes modos de operação, algumas interfaces com circuitos de teste de memória (BIST), divisores ou geradores de clocks assíncronos, entre outros, são exemplos de circuitos que se encontram bloqueados em scan ou possuem poucos pontos de observação/controle. Este trabalho descreve uma plataforma baseada em FPGA que usa modelos heterogêneos para co-emular blocos digitais, analógicos e de memória para a graduação de padrões em sistemas complexos. Adicionalmente introduziu-se quatro tipos de modelos que podem ser usados no FPGA, e os resultados de aplicar a técnica de co-emulação de falhas em alguns circuitos de benchmark incluindo ISCAS89, um conversor análogo digital, portas configuráveis de entrada/saída e um controlador de memória. / A platform and a technique to improve stuck-at fault grading efficiency through the use of hardware co-emulation is presented. IC manufacturers are always seeking for new ways to test their devices in order to deliver parts with zero defects to their customers. Scan is a well known technique that attains high fault coverage results with efficiency. Demands for new features motivate the creation of high complex systems with a mixture of analog and digital blocks with a communication interface that is difficult to cover with scan patterns. In addition, the logic that configures the chip for each of the different test modes, some BIST memory interfaces, asynchronous clock dividers or generators, among others, are examples of circuits that are blocked or have few observation/control points during scan. A FPGA based-platform that uses heterogeneous models to emulate digital, analog and memory blocks for fault grading patterns on complex systems is described. Also introduced in our proposal are four types of models that can be used with FPGAs, and the results of applying our fault co-emulation technique to some benchmark circuits including ISCAS89, ADC, iopads and memory controllers.

Este trabalho apresenta uma plataforma e uma técnica para o melhoramento da eficiência da graduação de falhas stuck-at de padrões de teste através do uso de co-emulação de hardware. Os fabricantes de Circuitos Integrados continuamente buscam novas formas de testar seus dispositivos com o intuito de distribuir peças sem defeitos aos seus clientes. Scan é uma técnica bem conhecida que consegue alta cobertura de falhas com eficiência. As demandas por novos recursos motivam a criação de sistemas complexos que fazem uso de uma mistura de blocos analógicos e digitais com uma interface de comunicação, difícil de ser coberta pelos padrões de scan. Adicionalmente, a lógica que configura o chip para cada um dos diferentes modos de operação, algumas interfaces com circuitos de teste de memória (BIST), divisores ou geradores de clocks assíncronos, entre outros, são exemplos de circuitos que se encontram bloqueados em scan ou possuem poucos pontos de observação/controle. Este trabalho descreve uma plataforma baseada em FPGA que usa modelos heterogêneos para co-emular blocos digitais, analógicos e de memória para a graduação de padrões em sistemas complexos. Adicionalmente introduziu-se quatro tipos de modelos que podem ser usados no FPGA, e os resultados de aplicar a técnica de co-emulação de falhas em alguns circuitos de benchmark incluindo ISCAS89, um conversor análogo digital, portas configuráveis de entrada/saída e um controlador de memória. / A platform and a technique to improve stuck-at fault grading efficiency through the use of hardware co-emulation is presented. IC manufacturers are always seeking for new ways to test their devices in order to deliver parts with zero defects to their customers. Scan is a well known technique that attains high fault coverage results with efficiency. Demands for new features motivate the creation of high complex systems with a mixture of analog and digital blocks with a communication interface that is difficult to cover with scan patterns. In addition, the logic that configures the chip for each of the different test modes, some BIST memory interfaces, asynchronous clock dividers or generators, among others, are examples of circuits that are blocked or have few observation/control points during scan. A FPGA based-platform that uses heterogeneous models to emulate digital, analog and memory blocks for fault grading patterns on complex systems is described. Also introduced in our proposal are four types of models that can be used with FPGAs, and the results of applying our fault co-emulation technique to some benchmark circuits including ISCAS89, ADC, iopads and memory controllers.

Les dernières technologies comme la 65nm, 45nm et la nouvelle technologie 32nm qui sera disponible à la fin de 2010, permettent la production de circuits de plus en plus complexes avec des performances très élevées. Ces nouvelles technologies imposent donc de nouveaux challenges pour la conception de circuits, mais également pour les méthodologies de test de fabrication et de diagnostic. De ce point de vue, les défaillances observées dans ces technologies ne peuvent pas être modélisées par des fautes classiques de collage. Les fautes de délai, de court-circuit, de circuit ouvert, etc. doivent également être prises en compte. Dans ce contexte, l'objectif de cette thèse a été de développer une méthode de diagnostic logique capable à la fois de traiter un ensemble complet de modèles de fautes et de fournir une localisation fiable et précise des défaillances dans un système sur puce. Ce manuscrit est organisé comme suit. Dans la première partie, les modèles de faute existants sont analysés afin de montrer les conditions de sensibilisation de chacun d'eux. La deuxième partie présente une méthode de diagnostic logique basée sur une approche « Effet-à-Cause». La dernière partie propose une nouvelle technique de diagnostic basée sur une approche « Cause-à-Effet » et permettant de traiter les circuits séquentiels. Les deux approches de diagnostic proposées exploitent les conditions de sensibilisations afin de cibler un ensemble élargi de modèles de fautes durant le processus de diagnostic. Les deux techniques sont validées sur un ensemble important de circuits benchmark et sur des systèmes sur puce fournis par la société STMicroelectronics. / Latest technologies like 65nm, 45nm and the next 32nm technology available at the end of 2010, allow the production of more and more complex and vey high performance circuits. These technologies lead to face with new challenges related to design, test and diagnosis. From this perspective, failures observed in these recent technologies can no longer be modeled by the classical stuck-at fault model. Delay faults, short-circuits, opens, etc. have also to be considered. In this context, the purpose of this thesis has been to develop a logic diagnosis approach able to deal with many types of faults as well as providing an accurate and reliable localization of failures in a system on chip. This manuscript is organized as follows. In the first part, existing fault models are analyzed in order to show the sensitization conditions related to each of them. The second part presents a logic diagnosis method based on the 'Effect-Cause' paradigm. The last part proposes another diagnosis technique based on the 'Cause-Effect' paradigm to deal with sequential circuits. The two proposed diagnosis approaches exploit the sensitization conditions in order to be able to consider a large set of fault models during the diagnosis process. Both techniques have been validated on a large set of benchmark circuits and on System-On-Chips provided by STMicroelectronics.