Built-in self-diagnosis exploiting strong diagnostic windows in mixed-mode test

Abstract

Efficient diagnosis procedures are crucial both for volume and for in-field diagnosis. In either case the underlying test strategy should provide a high coverage of realistic fault mechanisms and support a low-cost implementation. Built-in self-diagnosis (BISD) is a promising solution, if the diagnosis procedure is fully in line with the test flow. However, most known BISD schemes require multiple test runs or modifications of the standard scan-based test infrastructure. Some recent schemes circumvent these problems, but they focus on deterministic patterns to limit the storage requirements for diagnostic data. Thus, they cannot exploit the benefits of a mixed-mode test such as high coverage of non-target faults and reduced test data storage. This paper proposes a BISD scheme using mixed-mode patterns and partitioning the test sequence into “weak” and “strong” diagnostic windows, which are treated differently during diagnosis. As the experimental results show, this improves the coverage of non-target faults and enhances the diagnostic resolution compared to state-of-the-art approaches. At the same time the overall storage overhead for input and response data is considerably reduced.