Systematic Hold-time Fault Diagnosis and Failure Debug in Production Chips

Hold-time faults can occur in complex designs but can be difficult to diagnose. This paper presents a systematic hold-time diagnosis method for logic circuits. A four-phase flow is introduced to solve the problem. The identification phase identifies groups of systematic error logs by systematic errors. The filtering phase builds a majority error log to avoid the effect of random defects. The verification phase verifies that the candidate fault is a hold-time fault and recognizes capture flip-flops. The determination phase determines the fault models and their corresponding faulty flip-flops. Experiments on two industrial cases show the effectiveness of our technique, both of which have been verified through root-cause analysis. The proposed technique outperforms standard diagnosis performed by a commercial tool.