High Quality Pattern Generation for Delay Defects with Functional Sensitized Paths

Test patterns of path delay faults (PDFs) are usually generated with static or robust sensitizing criteria for side inputs of gates, because defects affecting the delays of the PDFs will be captured by these patterns unconditionally. However, under functional sensitization (FS), there exist a class of defects that can be tested unconditionally, if they are not masked by the off-input controlling values. In this paper, we propose a new pattern generation method for functionally sensitizable PDFs to improve the detectability of defects. It is shown in the experiments that with the proposed method, extra segments (up to 24.02% for one benchmark) of critical paths become testable compared with only robust/non-robust patterns.