Intelligent Analysis and Off-Line Debugging of VLSI Device Test Programs

  • Authors:
  • Yuhai Ma;Wanchun Shi

  • Affiliations:
  • Advantest America, Inc., 1510 Valley Center Parkway, Suite 110, Bethlehem, PA 18017, USA. y.ma@aaiate.com;Institute of Computing Technology, Academia Sinica, Beijing 100080, China

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Electronic Testing: Theory and Applications
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

Today‘s microelectronics researchers design VLSI devices to achieve highlydifferentiated devices, both in performance and functionality. As VLSI devices become more complex, VLSI device testingbecomes more costly and time consuming. The increasing test complexity leadsto longer device test programs development time as well as more expensivetest systems, and debugging testprograms is a great burden to the test programs development.On the other hand, there is little formal theory of debugging, and attempts to develop a methodology of debugging are rare. The aim of the investigation in this paper is to create a theory to support analysis and debugging of VLSI device test programs, and then, on the basis of this theory, design and develop an off-line debugging environment, OLDEVDTP, for the creation, analysis, checking, identifying,error location, and correction of the device test programs off-line from thetarget VLSI test system, to achieve a dramatic cost and time reduction. In the paper, fuzzy comprehensive evaluation techniques are applied to the program analysis and debugging process to reduce restrictions caused by computational complexity. Analysis, design, and implementation of OLDEVDTP are also addressed in the paper.