Test Time Reduction and Test Quality Improvement with Adaptive Testing Techniques
Date Issued
2015
Date
2015
Author(s)
Lin, Guo-Yu
Abstract
Due to the continuous shrinking of the device feature sizes and the growing number of transistors on a single chip, test cost is increasing dramatically. As a result, improving test quality with reasonable test cost becomes a challenging task. One popular adaptive test approach for reducing test cost is to reorder the test patterns according to their fault detection performance — by applying the more effective patterns first, the total test time can be significantly reduced. While very effective, the detection performance based approach fails to identify some high-quality test patterns and leaves them unused throughout the test application process. In our work, we propose a test-application-count based learning technique to help identify high-quality test patterns. By ensuring that all patterns are applied for at least the specified number of times, the proposed technique finds more high-quality test patterns and moves them to the front of the test pattern list. Experimental results show that the proposed test-application-count based learning technique achieves 52% test time reduction (TTR) in average — a 12% improvement compared to the detection performance based approach. About test quality improvement, we propose an adaptive test technique that, in the existence of varying defect characteristics, helps keeping the DPPM and test pattern count within the acceptable range. The idea is to monitor the detected fault characteristics and identify the types of occurring systematic faults. Then, the proposed technique adjusts the test pattern set accordingly to ensure sufficient fault coverage on the identified systematic defect types as well as the random defects. Simulation results show that the proposed technique successfully identifies the shift of systematic defect types and produces high-quality test set to reduce the overall test cost.
Subjects
Adaptive Testing
Reducing Test Cost
Test Quality Improvement
Type
thesis
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