Vlsi Testing

Hurst, an editor at the Microelectronics Journal, analyzes common problems that electronics engineers and circuit designers encounter while testing integrated circuits and the systems in which they are used, and explains a variety of solutions available for overcoming them in both digital and mixed circuits. Among his topics are faults in digital circuits, generating a digital test pattern, signatures and self-tests, structured design for testability, testing structured digital circuits and microprocessors, and financial aspects of testing. The self- contained reference is also suitable as a textbook in a formal course on the subject. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This book is a comprehensive guide to new DFT methods that will show the readers how to design a testable and quality product, drive down test cost, improve product quality and yield, and speed up time-to-market and time-to-volume. Most up-to-date coverage of design for testability. Coverage of industry practices commonly found in commercial DFT tools but not discussed in other books. Numerous, practical examples in each chapter illustrating basic VLSI test principles and DFT architectures.

This book discusses the new roles that the VLSI (very-large-scale integration of semiconductor circuits) is taking for the safe, secure, and dependable design and operation of electronic systems. The book consists of three parts. Part I, as a general introduction to this vital topic, describes how electronic systems are designed and tested with particular emphasis on dependability engineering, where the simultaneous assessment of the detrimental outcome of failures and cost of their containment is made. This section also describes the related research project “Dependable VLSI Systems,” in which the editor and authors of the book were involved for 8 years. Part II addresses various threats to the dependability of VLSIs as key systems components, including time-dependent degradations, variations in device characteristics, ionizing radiation, electromagnetic interference, design errors, and tampering, with discussion of technologies to counter those threats. Part III elaborates on the design and test technologies for dependability in such applications as control of robots and vehicles, data processing, and storage in a cloud environment and heterogeneous wireless telecommunications. This book is intended to be used as a reference for engineers who work on the design and testing of VLSI systems with particular attention to dependability. It can be used as a textbook in graduate courses as well. Readers interested in dependable systems from social and industrial–economic perspectives will also benefit from the discussions in this book.

Test functions (fault detection, diagnosis, error correction, repair, etc.) that are applied concurrently while the system continues its intended function are defined as on-line testing. In its expanded scope, on-line testing includes the design of concurrent error checking subsystems that can be themselves self-checking, fail-safe systems that continue to function correctly even after an error occurs, reliability monitoring, and self-test and fault-tolerant designs. On-Line Testing for VLSI contains a selected set of articles that discuss many of the modern aspects of on-line testing as faced today. The contributions are largely derived from recent IEEE International On-Line Testing Workshops. Guest editors Michael Nicolaidis, Yervant Zorian and Dhiraj Pradhan organized the articles into six chapters. In the first chapter the editors introduce a large number of approaches with an expanded bibliography in which some references date back to the sixties. On-Line Testing for VLSI is an edited volume of original research comprising invited contributions by leading researchers.

VLSI systems are becoming very complex and difficult to test. Traditional stuck-at fault problems may be inadequate to model possible manufacturing defects in the integrated ciruit. Hierarchial models are needed that are easy to use at the transistor and functional levels. Stuck-open faults present severe testing problems in CMOS circuits, to overcome testing problems testable designs are utilized. Bridging faults are important due to the shrinking geometry of ICs. BIST PLA schemes have common features-controllability and observability - which are enhanced through additional logic and test points. Certain circuit topologies are more easily testable than others. The amount of reconvergent fan-out is a critical factor in determining realistic measures for determining test generation difficulty. Test implementation is usually left until after the VLSI data path has been synthesized into a structural description. This leads to investigation methodologies for performing design synthesis with test incorporation. These topics and more are discussed.

The modern electronic testing has a forty year history. Test professionals hold some fairly large conferences and numerous workshops, have a journal, and there are over one hundred books on testing. Still, a full course on testing is offered only at a few universities, mostly by professors who have a research interest in this area. Apparently, most professors would not have taken a course on electronic testing when they were students. Other than the computer engineering curriculum being too crowded, the major reason cited for the absence of a course on electronic testing is the lack of a suitable textbook. For VLSI the foundation was provided by semiconductor device techn- ogy, circuit design, and electronic testing. In a computer engineering curriculum, therefore, it is necessary that foundations should be taught before applications. The field of VLSI has expanded to systems-on-a-chip, which include digital, memory, and mixed-signalsubsystems. To our knowledge this is the first textbook to cover all three types of electronic circuits. We have written this textbook for an undergraduate “foundations” course on electronic testing. Obviously, it is too voluminous for a one-semester course and a teacher will have to select from the topics. We did not restrict such freedom because the selection may depend upon the individual expertise and interests. Besides, there is merit in having a larger book that will retain its usefulness for the owner even after the completion of the course. With equal tenacity, we address the needs of three other groups of readers.

In the early days of digital design, we were concerned with the logical correctness of circuits. We knew that if we slowed down the clock signal sufficiently, the circuit would function correctly. With improvements in the semiconductor process technology, our expectations on speed have soared. A frequently asked question in the last decade has been how fast can the clock run. This puts significant demands on timing analysis and delay testing. Fueled by the above events, a tremendous growth has occurred in the research on delay testing. Recent work includes fault models, algorithms for test generation and fault simulation, and methods for design and synthesis for testability. The authors of this book, Angela Krstic and Tim Cheng, have personally contributed to this research. Now they do an even greater service to the profession by collecting the work of a large number of researchers. In addition to expounding such a great deal of information, they have delivered it with utmost clarity. To further the reader's understanding many key concepts are illustrated by simple examples. The basic ideas of delay testing have reached a level of maturity that makes them suitable for practice. In that sense, this book is the best x DELAY FAULT TESTING FOR VLSI CIRCUITS available guide for an engineer designing or testing VLSI systems. Tech niques for path delay testing and for use of slower test equipment to test high-speed circuits are of particular interest.

Doctoral Thesis / Dissertation from the year 2018 in the subject Computer Science - Applied, grade: 6, Anna University, course: PhD, language: English, abstract: Test data compression is an effective method for reducing test data volume and memory requirement with relatively small cost. An effective test structure for embedded hard cores is easy to implement and it is also capable of producing high-quality tests as part of the design flow. The purpose of Test data compression intends to reduce Test data volume by using Test Stimulus Compression such as Code-based schemes, Linear-decompression-based schemes and Broadcast-scan-based schemes. The research work addresses the problem of the test data volume and memory requirements. The primary objective of this study is to introduce novel techniques that improve the compression ratio by reducing test data volume during at-speed test in scan designs. This in turn diminishes the tester memory requirement and hence chip area is reduced for Built-in-Self Test environment. The aim of this research is to introduce various compression algorithms by combining the existing data compression techniques. The algorithms are designed to reduce the volume of test patterns of input that is essential to guarantee an acceptable level of fault coverage which is a key parameter to evaluate the quality of testing.