In this paper, we propose a scheme for test data reduction which uses broadcaster along with bit-flipping circuit. The proposed scheme can reduce test data without degrading the fault coverage of ATPG, and without requiring or modifying the arrangement of CUT. We theoretically analyze the test data size by the proposed scheme. The numerical examples obtained by the analysis and experimental results show that our scheme can effectively reduce test data if the care-bit rate is not so much low according to the number of scan chains. We also discuss the hybrid scheme of random-pattern-based flipping and single-input-based flipping.

We developed test data compression scheme for scan-based BIST, aiming to compress test stimuli and responses by more than 100 times. As scan-BIST architecture, we adopt BIST-Aided Scan Test (BAST), and combines four techniques: the invert-and-shift operation, run-length compression, scan address partitioning, and LFSR pre-shifting. Our scheme achieved a 100x compression rate in environments where Xs do not occur without reducing the fault coverage of the original ATPG vectors. Furthermore, we enhanced the masking logic to reduce data for X-masking so that test data is still compressed to 1/100 in a practical environment where Xs occur. We applied our scheme to five real VLSI chips, and the technique compressed the test data by 100x for scan-based BIST.

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.

With the increasing demand for SoCs to include rich functionality, SoCs are being designed with hundreds of small memories with different sizes and frequencies. If memory BIST logics were individually added to these various memories, the area overhead would be very high. To reduce the overhead, memory BIST logic must therefore be shared. This paper proposes a memory-grouping method for memory BIST logic sharing. A memory-grouping problem is formulated and an algorithm to solve the problem is proposed. Experimental results show that the proposed method reduced the area of the memory BIST wrapper by up to 40.55%. The results also show that the ability to select from two types of connection methods produced a greater reduction in area than using a single connection method.

This paper describes a BIST circuit for testing SoC integrated multi-channel serializer/deserializer (SerDes) macros. A newly developed packet-based PRBS generator enables the BIST to perform at-speed testing of asynchronous data transfers. In addition, a new technique for chained alignment checks between adjacent channels helps achieve a channel-count-independent architecture for verification of multi-channel alignment between SerDes macros. Fabricated in a 0.13-µm CMOS process and operating at > 500 MHz, the BIST has successfully verified all SerDes functions in at-speed testing of 5-Gbps20-ch SerDes macros.

In this paper, we provide a practical formulation of the problem of identifying all error occurrences and all failed scan cells in at-speed scan based BIST environment. We propose a method that can be used to identify every error when the circuit test frequency is higher than the tester frequency. Our approach requires very little extra hardware for diagnosis and the test application time required to identify errors is a linear function of the frequency ratio between the CUT and the tester.

This paper proposes a new approach for analog portion testing, which can meet requirements for high-speed and high-accuracy testing simultaneously with reasonable cost. The key concept of the new method is cooperation of an LSI tester and some circuitry built in a target SoC device. We will explain the operation principle of the proposed method. The proposed method can be one of the methods to overcome today's expensive production test of analog portion on SoC (System on Chip) devices which heavily depends on LSI tester capability and will become harder in near future.

In this paper, we propose a new clustered reconfigurable interconnect network (CRIN) BIST that can improve the embedding probabilities of random-pattern-resistant-patterns. A simulated annealing based algorithm that maximizes the embedding probabilities of scan test cubes has been developed to reorder scan cells. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed CRIN BIST technique reduces test time by 35% and the storage requirement by 39% in comparison with previous work.

A new low power test pattern generator (TPG) which can effectively reduce the average power consumption during test application is developed. The new TPG reduces the weighted switching activity (WSA) of the circuit under test (CUT) by suppressing transitions at some primary inputs which make many transitions. Moreover, the new TPG does not lose fault coverage. Experimental results on the ISCAS benchmark circuits show that average power reduction can be achieved up to 33.8% while achieving high fault coverage.

In delay fault BIST (Built-In-Self-Test), an adjacency test pattern generation scheme effectively generates robust test patterns. The traditional adjacency test pattern generation schemes use LFSR to generate first patterns, and thus they cannot generate test patterns for circuits with more than 30 inputs with high fault coverage in a practical amount of time. This paper proposes a deterministic delay fault BIST method using adjacency test pattern generation. The proposed scheme uses first patterns generated by a deterministic algorithm based on the analysis of independent partial circuits on the circuit under test. Experiments show that test patterns generated by the proposed method have both high fault coverage and short test length, resulting in a short test time.

In order to provide an efficient test method for PLL which is a mixed-signal circuit widely used in most of SoCs, a novel BIST method is developed. The new BIST uses the change of phase differences generated by selectively alternating the feedback frequency. It provides an efficient structural test, reduces an area overhead and improves the test accessibility.

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.

In the Reconfigurable System-On-a-Chip (RSOC), an FPGA core is embedded to improve the design flexibility of SOC. In this paper, we demonstrate that the embedded FPGA core is also feasible for use in implementing the proposed hybrid pattern Built-In Self-Test (BIST) in order to reduce the test cost of SOC. The hybrid pattern BIST, which combines Linear Feedback Shift Register (LFSR) with the proposed on-chip Deterministic Test Pattern Generator (DTPG), can achieve not only complete Fault Coverage (FC) but also minimum test sequence by applying a selective number of pseudorandom patterns. Furthermore, the hybrid pattern BIST is designed under the resource constraint of target FPGA core so that it can be implemented on any size of FPGA core and take full advantage of the target FPGA resource to reduce test cost. Moreover, the reconfigurable core-based approach has minimum hardware overhead since the FPGA core can be reconfigured as normal mission logic after testing such that it eliminates the hardware overhead of BIST logic. Experimental results for ISCAS 89 benchmarks and a platform FPGA chip have proven the efficiency of the proposed approach.

This letter presents a practical approach for high-quality built-in test using a test pattern generator called neighborhood pattern generator (NPG). NPG is practical mainly because its structure is independent of circuit under test and it can realize high fault coverage not only for stuck-at faults but also for transition faults. Some techniques are also proposed for further improvement in practical applicability of NPG. Experimental results for large industrial circuits illustrate the efficiency of the proposed approach.

In this paper, we show a method to locate a single stuck-at fault of a random access memory (RAM). From the fail-bitmaps of the RAM, we obtain their Walsh spectrum. For a single stuck-at fault, we show that the fault can be identified and located by using only the 0-th and 1-st coefficients of the spectrum. We also show a circuit to compute these coefficients. The computation time is O(2n), where n is the number of bits in the address of the RAM. The computation time is much shorter than one that uses a logic minimization method.

The partially rotational scan (PRS) technique greatly reduces the amount of data needed for n-detection testing. It also enables at-speed testing using low-speed testers. We designed tester intellectual properties (tester IP) with PRS for Viper and COMET II processors. When PRS was applied to a Viper processor, we obtained test data that provided the same fault coverage as with a set of automatic test pattern generation (ATPG) test vectors, although the amount of test data was 16% that of the ATPG. When the PRS technique was applied to a COMET II processor with full-scan design, we obtained test data that provided the same fault coverage as with a set of ATPG test vectors, although the amount of test data was 10% that of the ATPG. We also estimated hardware overhead and test time.

Reseeding technique is proposed to improve the fault coverage in pseudo-random testing. However most of previous works on reseeding is based on storing the seeds in an external tester or in a ROM. In this paper we present a built-in reseeding technique for LFSR-based test pattern generation. The proposed structure can run both in pseudorandom mode and in reseeding mode. Besides, our method requires no storage for the seeds since in reseeding mode the seeds can be generated automatically in hardware. In this paper we also propose an efficient grouping algorithm based on simulated annealing to optimize test vector grouping. Experimental results for benchmark circuits indicate the superiority of our technique against other reseeding methods with respect to test length and area overhead. Moreover, since the theoretical properties of LFSRs are preserved, our method could be beneficially used in conjunction with any other techniques proposed so far.

We analyze the timing design methodology for testing chips using a multiple-clock domain scheme. We especially focus on the layout design of the design-for-test (DFT) circuits and the clock network. First, we demonstrate the built-in-self-testing (BIST) scheme for multiple-clock domains. Then, we discuss the layout method that achieves a low clock-skew between different clock domains with a small modification of the original user logic layout. Finally, we evaluate the fault coverage of our large ASIC chips designed using our new methodology. The short design period and high fault coverage of our methodology are confirmed using actual industrial designs. We introduce a viable approach for industrial designs because designers don't have to pay much attention to DFT. Our approach also provides designers with an easy method for LSI debugging and diagnostics.

We propose a technique of selecting seeds for the LFSR-based test pattern generators that are used in VLSI BISTs. By setting the computed seed as an initial value, target fault coverage, for example 100%, can be accomplished with minimum test length. We can also maximize fault coverage for a given test length. Our method can be used for both test-per-clock and test-per-scan BISTs. The procedure is based on vector representations over GF(2m), where m is the number of LFSR stages. The results indicate that test lengths derived through selected seeds are about sixty percent shorter than those derived by simple seeds, i.e. 0001, for a given fault coverage. We also show that seeds obtained through this technique accomplish higher fault coverage than the conventional selection procedure. In terms of the c7552 benchmark, taking a test-per-scan architecture with a 20-bit LFSR as an example, the number of undetected faults can be decreased from 304 to 227 for 10,000 LFSR patterns using our proposed technique.

This paper describes an Embedded DRAM Hybrid Macro, which supports various memory specifications. The eDRAM module generator with Hybrid Macro provides more than 120,000 eDRAM configurations. This eDRAM includes a new architecture called Auto Signal Management (ASM) architecture, which automatically adjusts the timing of the control signals for various eDRAM configurations, and reduces the design Turn Around Time. An Enhanced-on-chip Tester performs the maximum 512b I/O pass/fail simultaneous judgments and the real time repair analysis. The eDRAM testing time is reduced to about 1/64 of the time required using the conventional technique. A test chip is fabricated using a 0.18 µm 4-metal embedded DRAM technology, which utilizes the triple-well, dual-Tox, and Co salicide process technologies. This chip achieves a wide voltage range operation of 1.2 V at 100 MHz to 1.8 V at 200 MHz.