On Improving Transition Test Set Quality to Detect CMOS Transistor Stuck-Open Faults

Abstract

Detecting the defects inside the CMOS cells, especially the stuck-open faults, has gained a lot of attentions in recent years. It had been shown the test set generated by using the transition fault model is not sufficient to detect the stuck-open faults. In this paper, we propose an enhanced transition fault model, named cell transition, to improve the quality of the transition test set on detecting the stuck-open faults inside the CMOS cells. The fault sites targeted by the proposed model are placed at the cell boundary in order to keep the fault population similar to the transition fault model. Experimental results demonstrate the cell transition test set detects more stuck-open faults than the transition test set while the test coverage achieved for the transition faults is close to that obtained by the transition test set. Moreover, the number of generated tests is slightly higher than the transition test set.