Layout-aware scan chain synthesis for improved path delay fault coverage

  • Authors:
  • P. Gupta;A. B. Kahng;I. I. Mandoiu;P. Sharma

  • Affiliations:
  • Dept. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., Univ. of California, La Jolla, CA, USA;-;-;-

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Path delay fault testing has become increasingly important due to higher clock rates and higher process variability caused by shrinking geometries. Achieving high-coverage path delay fault testing requires the application of scan justified test vector pairs, coupled with careful ordering of the scan flip-flops and/or insertion of dummy flip-flops in the scan chain. Previous works on scan synthesis for path delay fault testing using scan shifting have focused exclusively on maximizing fault coverage and/or minimizing the number of dummy flip-flops, but have disregarded the scan wirelength overhead. In this paper we propose a layout-aware coverage-driven scan chain ordering methodology and give exact and heuristic algorithms for computing the achievable tradeoffs between path delay fault coverage and both dummy flip-flop and wirelength costs. Experimental results show that our scan chain ordering methodology yields significant improvements in path delay coverage with a very small increase in wirelength overhead compared to previous layout-driven approaches, and similar coverage with up to 25 times improvement in wirelength compared to previous layout-oblivious coverage-driven approaches.