TY - JOUR
T1 - Efficient overdetection elimination of acceptable faults for yield improvement
AU - Lee, Kuen Jong
AU - Hsieh, Tong Yu
AU - Breuer, Melvin A.
N1 - Funding Information:
Manuscript received January 31, 2011; revised August 11, 2011; accepted November 7, 2011. Date of current version April 20, 2012. This work was supported in part by the National Science Council of Taiwan, under Contracts NSC99-2220-E-006-021 and NSC100-2218-E-110-001, and in part by the National Science Foundation, under Awards CNS-0720909 and CCF-1018869. This paper was recommended by Associate Editor K. Chakrabarty.
PY - 2012/5
Y1 - 2012/5
N2 - Acceptable faults in a circuit under test (CUT) refer to those faults that have no or only minor impacts on the performance of the CUT. A circuit with an acceptable fault may be marketable for some specific applications. Therefore, by carefully dealing with these faults during testing, significant yield improvement can be achieved. Previous studies have shown that the patterns generated by a conventional automatic test pattern generation procedure to detect all unacceptable faults also detect many acceptable ones, resulting in a severe loss on achievable yield improvement. In this paper, we present a novel test methodology called multiple test set detection (MTSD) to totally eliminate this overdetection problem. A basic test set generation method is first presented, which depicts a fundamental scheme to generate appropriate test sets for MTSD. We then describe an enhanced test generation method that can significantly reduce the total number of test patterns. Solid theoretical derivations are provided to validate the effectiveness of the proposed methods. Experimental results show that in general an 80%-99% reduction in the number of test patterns can be achieved compared with previous work addressing this problem.
AB - Acceptable faults in a circuit under test (CUT) refer to those faults that have no or only minor impacts on the performance of the CUT. A circuit with an acceptable fault may be marketable for some specific applications. Therefore, by carefully dealing with these faults during testing, significant yield improvement can be achieved. Previous studies have shown that the patterns generated by a conventional automatic test pattern generation procedure to detect all unacceptable faults also detect many acceptable ones, resulting in a severe loss on achievable yield improvement. In this paper, we present a novel test methodology called multiple test set detection (MTSD) to totally eliminate this overdetection problem. A basic test set generation method is first presented, which depicts a fundamental scheme to generate appropriate test sets for MTSD. We then describe an enhanced test generation method that can significantly reduce the total number of test patterns. Solid theoretical derivations are provided to validate the effectiveness of the proposed methods. Experimental results show that in general an 80%-99% reduction in the number of test patterns can be achieved compared with previous work addressing this problem.
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U2 - 10.1109/TCAD.2011.2179036
DO - 10.1109/TCAD.2011.2179036
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84860279969
SN - 0278-0070
VL - 31
SP - 754
EP - 764
JO - IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems
JF - IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems
IS - 5
M1 - 6186858
ER -