Software-enabled design visibility enhancement for failure analysis process improvement

Abstract

Traditional failure analysis (FA) process proceeds by investigating the tester results of several suspected silicon signals, and then applying CAD tools to navigate and compare pre-silicon design behaviors. However, existing CAD tools usually lack of design visibility due to the imperfect link between test and design environments. In this paper, we introduce a series of design visibility enhancement tools to augment FA process flow. These tools not only feature design comprehension and logic tracing capability, but also expand and correlate silicon data to design functionality. With the seamless visibility enhancement environment, we show the FA process can be performed more efficiently.