Built-in Self-Test for crosstalk faults in a digital VLSI

Accompanying high-integration and high-speed implementation of VLSI in recent years, new faults which cannot be classified in the category of conventional fault models have become a problem. Among these new faults, we will deal with crosstalk faults in this paper. Because of excitation and propagation of the crosstalk faults in the detection of these faults, two successive test vectors are required and thus their generation is difficult. Moreover, it is necessary in the sequential circuit to consider the problem of timing such as gate delay time and FF setup time in the circuit. For that reason, it has been difficult to realize a high fault coverage in the test vector generation methods proposed so far. To solve these problems, we will newly propose in this paper a Built-In Self-Test (BIST) method which can detect the crosstalk faults. This method can be realized by a relatively small area overhead; moreover, by adopting a circuit configuration during simulation which is different from the one during test, the simulation time is shortened. In this way, testing of large-scale circuits has been made possible. We have performed an evaluation on the fault coverage for several benchmark circuits and shown that this method is effective for crosstalk faults. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Comp Jpn, 33(13): 35–47, 2002; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www. interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/scj.1171