The article "Robust Pattern Generation for Small Delay Faults under Process Variations" by Hanieh Jafarzadeh, Florian Klemme, Jan Dennis Reimer, Zahra Paria Najafi-Haghi, Hussam Amrouch, Sybille Hellebrand, and Hans-Joachim Wunderlich has been accepted at the IEEE International Test Conference 2023.
Abstract:
Small Delay Faults (SDFs) introduce additional delays smaller than the capture time and require timing-aware test pattern generation. Since process variations can invalidate the effectivity of such patterns, different circuit instances may show a different fault coverage. This paper presents a method to generate test pattern sets for SDFs which are valid for all circuit timings. The method overcomes the limitations of known timing-aware Automatic Test Pattern Generation (ATPG) which has to use fault sampling under process variations due to the computational complexity.
A statistical learning scheme maximises the coverage of SDFs in an entire circuit population following the variation parameters of a calibrated industrial FinFET transistor model. The method combines efficient ATPG for Transition Faults (TFs) with fast timing-aware fault simulation on GPUs. Simulation experiments show that the size of the pattern set is significantly reduced in comparison to standard N-detection while the fault coverage even increases compared to both N-detection and timing-aware ATPG.