Intra-Cell Defects Diagnosis

Abstract

The diagnosis is the process of isolating possible sources of observed failures in a defective circuit. Today, manufacturing defects appear not only in the cell interconnection, but also inside the cell itself (intra-cell defect). State of the art diagnosis approaches can identify the defect location at gate level (i.e., one or more standard cells and/or inter-connections can be provided as possible defect location). Some approaches have been developed to target the intra-cell defects. In this paper, we propose an intra-cell diagnosis method based on the Effect-Cause paradigm aiming at locating the root cause of the observed failures inside a logic cell. It is based on the Critical Path Tracing (CPT) here applied at transistor level. The main characteristic of our approach is that it exploits the analysis of the faulty behavior induced by the actual defect. In other word, we locate the defect by simply analyzing the effect induced by the defect itself. The advantage is the fact that we are defect independent (i.e., we do not have to explicitly consider the type and the size of the defect). Moreover, since the complexity of a single cell in terms of transistor number is low, the proposed intra-cell diagnosis approach requires a negligible computational time. The efficiency of the proposed approach has been evaluated by means of experimental results carried out on both simulations-based and industrial silicon data case studies.