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RTL DFT Techniques to Enhance Defect Coverage for Functional Test Sequences

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Abstract

Functional test sequences are often used in manufacturing testing to target defects that are not detected by structural test. However, they suffer from low defect coverage since they are mostly derived in practice from existing design-verification test sequences. Therefore, there is a need to increase their effectiveness using design-for-testability (DFT) techniques. We present a DFT method that uses the register-transfer level (RTL) output deviations metric to select observation points for an RTL design and a given functional test sequence. Simulation results for six ITC′99 circuits show that the proposed method outperforms two baseline methods for several gate-level coverage metrics, including stuck-at, transition, bridging, and gate-equivalent fault coverage. Moreover, by inserting a small subset of all possible observation points using the proposed method, significant fault coverage increase is obtained for all benchmark circuits.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Duke University, Box 90291, 130 Hudson Hall, Durham, NC, 27708, USA

    Hongxia Fang & Krishnendu Chakrabarty

  2. Graduate School of Information Science, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Kansai Science City, Nara, 630-0192, Japan

    Hideo Fujiwara

Authors
  1. Hongxia Fang
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  2. Krishnendu Chakrabarty
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  3. Hideo Fujiwara
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hongxia Fang.

Additional information

Responsible Editor: P. Mishra

This research was supported in part by the Semiconductor Research Corporation under Contract no. 1588, and by an Invitational Fellowship from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. This paper is based on a preliminary version of an invited paper in Proceedings of IEEE International High Level Design Validation and Test Workshop, 2009, and a presentation at the IEEE Workshop on RTL and High-Level Testing, 2009.

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Fang, H., Chakrabarty, K. & Fujiwara, H. RTL DFT Techniques to Enhance Defect Coverage for Functional Test Sequences. J Electron Test 26, 151–164 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10836-009-5135-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10836-009-5135-1

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