Delay Testing Based on Multiple Faulty Behaviors

Abstract

We discuss overall “observed” behaviors of circuits due to additional delays caused by various variations in the chips and propose delay testing methods based on such analysis. First we examine functional changes caused by the additional delays on the inputs of each gate in the circuit. We show that unlike structural faults, e.g., stuck-at faults, such additional delays can introduce many more different faulty functions on a gate, and we propose two functional delay fault models for the changed behaviors caused by the additional delays, one with one time frame and the other with two time frames. As such additional delays by variations and other reasons naturally happen in multiple locations simultaneously, there can be exponentially many multiple fault combinations to be considered. It is not at all easy to analyze them with traditional automatic test pattern generation (ATPG) methods which rely on fault dropping with explicit representation of fault lists. So in the second part of the paper, we present an ATPG method based on implicit representations of fault lists. As faults are represented implicitly, even if numbers of simultaneous faults are large and total numbers of fault combinations are exponentially many, we may still be able to successfully perform ATPG processes. Experimental results have shown that even for large circuits in the ISCAS89 benchmark circuits, complete sets of test vectors for all multiple combinations of the proposed functional delay faults are successfully generated in a couple of hours. The numbers of required test vectors for complete testing are surprisingly small, e.g., only a few thousands for circuits having more than ten thousands of gates, even though there are more than \(2^{(ten thousands)}\) combinations of multiple faults in those circuits. This indicates that the proposed multiple functional delay fault models may have practical values as they consider all types of multiple functional faults caused by extended delays in the circuit.