An ATPG for Threshold Testing: Obtaining Acceptable Yield in Future Processes
ITC '02 Proceedings of the 2002 IEEE International Test Conference
Defect and Error Tolerance in the Presence of Massive Numbers of Defects
IEEE Design & Test
Intelligible Test Techniques to Support Error-Tolerance
ATS '04 Proceedings of the 13th Asian Test Symposium
Analysis and Testing for Error Tolerant Motion Estimation
DFT '05 Proceedings of the 20th IEEE International Symposium on Defect and Fault Tolerance in VLSI Systems
Hardware Testing For Error Tolerant Multimedia Compression based on Linear Transforms
DFT '05 Proceedings of the 20th IEEE International Symposium on Defect and Fault Tolerance in VLSI Systems
Yield analysis of partial defect tolerant bit-plane array
Computers & Mathematics with Applications
Hardware that produces bounded rather than exact results
Proceedings of the 47th Design Automation Conference
IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems
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Error-tolerance is an innovative way to enhance the effective yield of IC products. Previously a test methodology based on error-rate estimation to support error-tolerance was proposed. Without violating the system error-rate constraint specified by the user, this methodology identifies a set of faults that can be ignored during testing, thereby leading to a significant improvement in yield. However, usually the patterns detecting all of the unacceptable faults also detect a large number of acceptable faults, resulting in a degradation in achievable yield improvement. In this paper, we first provide a probabilistic analysis of this problem and show that a conventional ATPG procedure cannot adequately address this problem. We then present a novel test pattern selection procedure and an output masking technique to deal with this problem. The selection process generates a test set aimed to detect all unacceptable faults but as few acceptable faults as possible. The masking technique then examines the generated test patterns and identifies a list of output lines that can be masked (not observed) during testing so as to further avoid the detection of acceptable faults. Experimental results show that by employing the proposed techniques, only a small number of acceptable faults are still detected. In many cases the actual yield improvement approaches the optimal value that can be achieved.