Application of Cell-Aware Test on an Advanced 3nm CMOS Technology Library

Abstract

Advanced technology nodes employ a large number of innovations. In addition, they require ‘scaling boosters’ in the design of standard-cell libraries to be able to offer the scaling benefits in area, performance, and power that we have grown accustomed to. Consequently, sub-10nm standard cells are significantly more complex than their predecessors. Cell-aware test (CAT) explicitly targets cell-internal resistive open and short defects identified through extensive characterization of the library cells. This paper is (to the best of our knowledge) the first to report on the application of CAT library characterization on a sub-10nm technology node. We used Cadence's CAT tool flow on an experimental 114-cell-library in IMEC's 3nm CMOS technology iN5. Despite the increased cell complexity, we show that the CAT flow still works, and that compared with functionally-comparable library cells in a 45nm technology, the number of potential non-equivalent defect locations, cell-level test patterns, and defect coverage did not change drastically.