Bilateral Testing of Nano-scale Fault-Tolerant Circuits

  • Authors:
  • Lei Fang;Michael S. Hsiao

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, USA 24061;Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, USA 24061

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Electronic Testing: Theory and Applications
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

As the technology enters the nano dimension, the inherent unreliability of nanoelectronics is making fault-tolerant architectures increasingly necessary in building nano systems. Because fault-tolerant hardwares help to mask the effects caused by increased levels of defects, testing the functionality of the chip together with the embedded fault-tolerance becomes a tremendous challenge. In this paper, a new bilateral testing framework for nano circuits is proposed, where multiple stuck-at faults across different modules in a triple module redundancy (TMR) architecture are considered. In addition, a new test generator is presented for the bilateral testing that takes into account the enormous number of bilateral stuck-at faults possible with new types of guidance in the search, and it can generate a set of vectors that can test the TMR-based nano circuit as a single entity. Experimental results reported for ISCAS'85 and ITC99 circuits demonstrate that the bilateral testing can help to capture many more defects which the single stuck-at fault misses.