Built-in self-test (BIST) hardware is included today in many chips. This hardware is used to test the chip's functional circuits. Since this BIST hardware is manufactured using the same technology as the functional circuits themselves, it is possible for it to be faulty. It is important, therefore, to assess the impact of this unreliable BIST on the product defect level after test. Williams and Brown's formula, relating the product defect level as a function of the manufacturing yield and fault coverage, is re-examined in this paper. In particular, special attention is given to the influence of an unreliable BIST on this relationship. We show that when the BIST hardware is used to screen the functional product, an unreliable BIST circuitry tends, in many cases, to reduce the effective fault coverage and increase the corresponding product defect level. The BIST unreliability impact is assessed for both early life phase, and product maturity phase.

This paper proposes two power-constrained test synthesis schemes and scheduling algorithms, under non-scan BIST, for RTL data paths. The first scheme uses boundary non-scan BIST, and can achieve low hardware overheads. The second scheme uses generic non-scan BIST, and can offer some tradeoffs between hardware overhead, test application time and power dissipation. A designer can easily select an appropriate design parameter based on the desired tradeoff. Experimental results confirm the good performance and practicality of our new approaches.

In [1] the impact of BIST on the chip defect level after test has been addressed. It was assumed in [1] that no measures are taken to ensure that the BIST circuitry is fault-free before launching the functional test. In this paper we assume that a BIST pretest is first conducted in order to get rid of all chips that fail it. Only chips whose BIST circuitry has passed the pretest are kept, while the rest are discarded. The BIST pretest, however, is assumed to have only a limited coverage against its own faults. This paper studies the product quality improvements as induced by the BIST pretest, and provides some insight as to when it may be worthwhile to perform it.

Coefficient-based test (CBT) is introduced for detecting parametric faults in analog circuits. The method uses pseudo Monte-Carlo simulation and system identification tools to determine whether a given circuit under test (CUT) is faulty.

This paper describes a random access memory (RAM, sometimes also called an array) test scheme that has the following attributes: (1) Can be used in both built-in mode and off chip/module mode. (2) Can be used to test and diagnose naked arrays. (3) Fault diagnosis is simple and is "free" for some faults during test. (4) Is never subject to aliasing. (5) Depending upon the test length, it can detect many kinds of failures, like stuck-cells, decoder faults, shorts, pattern-sensitive, etc. (6) If used as built-in feature, it does not slow down the normal operation of the array. (7) Does not require storage of correct responses. A single response bit always indicates whether a fault has been detected. Thus, the storage requirement for the implementation of the test scheme is zero. (8) If used as a built-in feature, the hardware overhead is very low.