Physically-Aware $N$ -Detect Test

Physically-aware
$N$
-detect (
$PAN$
-detect) test improves defect coverage by exploiting defect locality. This paper presents physically-aware test selection (PATS) to efficiently generate
$PAN$
-detect tests for large industrial designs. Compared to traditional
$N$
-detect test, the quality resulting from
$PAN$
-detect is enhanced without any increase in test execution cost. Experiment results from an IBM in-production application-specific integrated circuit demonstrate the effectiveness of PATS in improving defect coverage. Moreover, utilizing novel test-metric evaluation, we compare the effectiveness of traditional
$N$
-detect and
$PAN$
-detect, and demonstrate the impact of automatic test pattern generation parameters on the effectiveness of
$PAN$
-detect.