Automating the Generation of Functional Stress Inducing Stimuli for Burn-In Testing

In the domain of high reliability applications, Burn-In testing (BI) is always present since it is one of the prime countermeasures against the infant mortality phenomenon. Traditional static BI testing proves to be inefficient for modern circuit designs. As the devices’ feature size scales down and their structural and architectural complexity increases, so does the complexity and cost of the BI test. Different BI methods are employed by the industry where stimuli are also applied to the devices under test (DUTs) in order to effectively stress and stimulate all nets of the design. One known industry practice resorts to Design for Testability (DfT) infrastructures (e.g., scan) and is based on the application of test vectors at low frequency to excite the DUT as much as possible with the goal of switching each net of the design at least once. In this paper we consider the case where the layout of the circuit is known and propose two novel methods able to automatically produce functional stimuli to switch pairs of neighboring nodes (i.e., nodes that are placed within a specified distance in the DUT) in short periods of time. This solution has been shown to be able to trigger some latent defects in a circuit better than other methods. As a case study, we target functional units within a RISC-V processor (RI5CY). We show that the functional stimuli generated by the exact method described in the paper are able to achieve optimal results (i.e., the maximum functional switching of neighboring pairs), thus maximizing the chance that their at-speed application can activate weak points in the circuit.