Built-In Self-Test and Recovery Procedures for Molecular Electronics-Based Nanofabrics

Abstract

In this paper, a built-in self-test (BIST) procedure is proposed for testing and fault tolerance of molecular electronics-based nanofabrics. The nanofabrics are assumed to include up to 1012 devices/cm2; this requires new test strategies that can efficiently test and diagnose the nanofabrics in a reasonable time. Our BIST procedure utilizes nanofabric components as small test groups containing test pattern generator and response analyzer. Small test groups (fine-grained test) result in higher diagnosability and recovery. The proposed technique applies the test in parallel with a low number of test configurations resulting in a manageable test time. Due to high defect density of nanofabrics, an efficient diagnosis procedure is done after BIST procedure to achieve high recovery. This is called recovery-increase procedure, and this increases the available number of fault-free components detected in a nanochip. Finally, a defect database called defect map is created to be used by compilers during the configuration of the nanofabrics to avoid defective components. This results in a reliable system constructed from unreliable components. Our simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed BIST and recovery-increase procedures