Enhancing dictionary based test data compression using the ATE repeat instruction

Abstract

The manufacturing test cost of an IC depends heavily of its test data volume. In this paper we show how to exploit the features of a dictionary based test data compression technique in order to increase the count and the length of 0s and 1s runs appearing in the compressed test data. Then, we experimentally show that using the ATE repeat instruction the test data volume which should be stored in the ATE vector memory can be further reduced significantly.