Variation-aware deterministic ATPG

Abstract

In technologies affected by variability, the detection status of a small-delay fault may vary among manufactured circuit instances. The same fault may be detected, missed or provably undetectable in different circuit instances. We introduce the first complete flow to accurately evaluate and systematically maximize the test quality under variability. As the number of possible circuit instances is infinite, we employ statistical analysis to obtain a test set that achieves a fault-efficiency target with an user-defined confidence level. The algorithm combines a classical path-oriented test-generation procedure with a novel waveform-accurate engine that can formally prove that a small-delay fault is not detectable and does not count towards fault efficiency. Extensive simulation results demonstrate the performance of the generated test sets for industrial circuits affected by uncorrelated and correlated variations.