Delay Fault Coverage Enhancement Using Variable Observation Times

  • Authors:
  • W. B. Jone;Y. P. Ho;S. R. Das

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Chung-Cheng University, Chiayi, Taiwan R.O.C. E-mail: jone@cs.ccu.edu.tw, ho@cs.ccu.edu.tw;Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Chung-Cheng University, Chiayi, Taiwan R.O.C. E-mail: jone@cs.ccu.edu.tw, ho@cs.ccu.edu.tw;Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario K1n 6n4, Canada. E-mail: das@trix.genie.uottawa.ca

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Electronic Testing: Theory and Applications
  • Year:
  • 1997

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Abstract

Detection of system timing failures has become a very importantproblem whenever high speed system operation is required. It has beendemonstrated that delay fault coverage loss could be significant if improperpropagation paths are used. This occurs when the delay test pair of a targetpropagation path cannot be effectively generated by an ATPG tool, or whenstuck-at test patterns are used as transition (or gate) delay test patterns.In this work, an efficient method is proposed to reduce the amount of faultcoverage loss by using variable observation times. The basic idea is tooffset the shorter propagation paths (really used) by tightening theobservation times. Given a probability distribution of defect sizes and aset of slack differences, this method is able to locate several observationtimes that result in small fault coverage loss.