We are pleased to announce that our paper entitled "Minimizing PVT-Variability by Exploiting the Zero Temperature Coefficient (ZTC) for Robust Delay Fault Testing" has been accepted for the "IEEE International Test Conference" (ITC'24) in San Diego, USA. This work is the result of a cooperation with the University of Stuttgart, the University of Paderborn and the Technical University of Munich (TUM). The authors involved are Hanieh Jafarzadeh, Florian Klemme, Jan Dennis Reimer, Hussam Amrouch, Sybille Hellebrand und Hans-Joachim Wunderlich.
Abstract: Process-, voltage and temperature (PVT) variations significantly complicate test generation for small delay faults, as test patterns that are effective for one circuit instance may no longer be valid for another. Temperature-related timing variations in FinFET and Gate-All-Around (GAA) technologies are particularly severe due to temperature fluctuations and self-heating. Depending on the supply voltage, they exhibit Temperature Effect Inversion (TEI), which describes the increase in circuit delay with increasing temperature. The Zero Temperature Coefficient (ZTC) defines a supply voltage at which TEI approaches 0 and the effects of temperature-related fluctuations are minimized. The simulation resuts show that test generation ZTC voltage leads to a higher fault coverage of SDFs, while significantly fewer test samples are required.