Aging monitor reuse for small delay fault testing

Abstract

Small delay faults receive more and more attention, since they may indicate a circuit reliability marginality even if they do not violate the timing at the time of production. At-speed test and faster-than-at-speed test (FAST) are rather expensive tasks to test for such faults. The paper at hand avoids complex on-chip structures or expensive high-speed ATE for test response evaluation, if aging monitors which are integrated into the device under test anyway are reused. The main challenge in reusing aging monitors for FAST consists in possible false alerts at higher frequencies. While a certain test vector pair makes a delay fault observable at one monitor, it may also exceed the time slack in the fault free case at a different monitor which has to be masked. Therefore, a multidimensional optimizing problem has to be solved for minimizing the masking overhead and the number of test vectors while maximizing delay fault coverage.