Low-cost diagnostic pattern generation and evaluation procedures for noise-related failures

As technology feature geometries shrink, failures caused by signal integrity issues have become prominent during test. To avoid the time consuming silicon inspection and reduce the engineering cost and effort for failure analysis, a fast and cost-effective diagnostic flow is proposed in this paper. The flow targets delay faults and can be used to (1) identify noise-related failures with a quiet pattern and (2) evaluate the failed pattern in terms of its noise-induced delay to help identify the root cause of failure. A novel procedure is developed to generate a quiet pattern to help differentiate sources of the failure. The quiet pattern targets the same physical defects as the failed pattern but offers much lower noises level. A pattern evaluation procedure is used to evaluate the noise-induced delay. The proposed procedures are implemented on ITC'99 b19 benchmark. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed procedure in identifying the failure mechanism. The noise-induced path delay for both failed patterns and diagnostic quiet patterns are thoroughly evaluated.