Detectability of internal bridging faults in scan chains

Scan chains contain a high percentage of the transistors in logic parts of VLSI designs. Nevertheless, faults inside scan cells are not directly targeted by scan based tests currently used, and they are assumed to be detected by what are called flush tests. Recently we investigated the detectability of stuck-at, stuck-on and stuck-open faults internal to scan chains using existing tests. We also proposed new flush tests and appropriate ordering of flush tests to achieve higher fault coverage. In this paper, we investigate detection of a set of scan cell internal bridging faults extracted from layout. We show that the detection of some zero-resistance non-feedback bridging faults requires two-pattern tests. Half-speed flush tests we proposed earlier to improve the coverage of stuck-at, stuck-on and stuck-open faults also detect additional bridging faults. We classify the undetectable faults based on the reasons for their undetectability. We observe that the driver strengths of the scan cell inputs can be optimized to improve the bridging fault coverage. Both zero-resistance and nonzero-resistance bridging fault models are considered in this work. A low power supply voltage based test method and IDDQ testing are examined for resistive bridging fault detection.

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