Delay fault diagnosis for nonrobust test

Abstract

With feature sizes steadily shrinking, manufacturing defects and parameter variations often cause design timing failures. It is essential that those errors be correctly and quickly diagnosed. The existing delay-fault diagnosis algorithms cannot identify the delay faults that require nonrobust tests, because they ignore nonrobust propagation conditions while emulating the failure analyzer's behavior. We propose a novel approach to perform delay-fault diagnosis for robust and nonrobust tests. The experimental results show that our approach can diagnose delay faults with good resolution. It is stable with respect to delay variations that the failure analyzer might experience