Summary and Outlook

Abstract

The production test is an important task in the design and manufacturing flow of today’s circuits. Test patterns generated by Automatic Test Pattern Generation (ATPG) algorithms ensure that erroneous chips are filtered out before being delivered to customers. However, classical ATPG algorithms reach their limit and the high fault coverage demands of the industry are compromised since these algorithms have difficulties to cope with the growing number of hard-to-detect faults. Due to the shrinking feature sizes and increased speed of modern designs, delay fault testing becomes more and more important. The problem of the large number of unclassified faults is very serious in delay fault test generation which is more complex than classical stuck-at fault test generation.