Test Pattern Selection for Potentially Harmful Open Defects in Power Distribution Networks

Power distribution network (PDN) designs for today's high performance integrated circuits (ICs) typically occupy a significant share of metal resources in the circuit, and hence defects may be introduced on PDNs during the manufacturing process. Since we cannot afford to over-design the PDNs to tolerate all possible defects, it is necessary to conduct manufacturing test for them. In this paper, we propose novel methodologies to identify those potentially harmful open defects in PDNs and we show how to select a set of patterns that initially target transition faults to achieve high fault coverage for the PDN defects. Experimental results on benchmark circuits demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique.