EE4695 Hardware dependability

With the continuous scaling of transistor feature sizes, the VLSI chip density is exponentially increasing. This results in a significant complexity of today's and future VLSI technology; such a complexity has reached the point where billions of transistors are integrated on a single chip (as it is the case for System on Chip). To guarantee customer's satisfaction, produced VLSI chips have to be reliable and fully tested. Verification and production testing represent 50 to 60% of the chips production total cost, and are now the biggest cost of the technology. It has been known for a while that tackling problems associated with testing VLSI chips at earlier design stage levels significantly reduces the testing cost. Thus it is important for hardware designers to be exposed to concepts of VLSI testing which can help them design better products at lower cost.

To get a feeling about how important is test technology, you can imagine that just (functionally) testing of a 64bit adder (no flip-flops) at 1GHz will cost 585 years! What about today�s chips with millions of flip flops? What are the practical and the efficient ways to deal with testing of VLSI chips?

This course is an introduction to the field of digital systems testing, which is an integral part of IC design and manufacturing. The topics discussed are: Importance of VLSI Testing, Test process and Automatic Test Equipment, Defects versus Fault Models, Fault Simulation, Logic Simulation, Combinational Circuit Testing, Sequential Circuit Testing, Memory Testing, Design-for-Testability, Scan Design, Boundary Scan, Built-in-Self Test, Delay Test, Current Testing and Reliability.

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Last modified: 2022-06-19