On systematic illegal state identification for pseudo-functional testing

摘要

The discrepancy between integrated circuits' activities in normal functional mode and that in structural test mode has an increasing adverse impact on the effectiveness of manufacturing test. Pseudo-functional testing tries to resolve this problem by identifying illegal states in functional mode and avoiding them during the test pattern generation process. Existing methods, however, can only extract a small set of illegal states in the system due to various limitations. In this paper, we first show that illegal states in the system are mainly caused by multi-fanout nets in the circuit, and we develop efficient and effective heuristics to identify them. Experimental results on benchmark circuits demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed systematic solution.