Diagnosing At-Speed Scan BIST Circuits Using a Low Speed and Low Memory Tester

Numerous solutions have been proposed to reduce test data volume and test application time during manufacturing testing of digital devices. However, time to market challenge also requires a very efficient debug phase. Error identification in the test responses can become impractically slow in the debug phase due to large debug data, slow tester speed, and limited memory of the tester. In this paper, we investigate the problems and solutions related to using a relatively slow and limited memory tester to observe the at-speed behavior of fast circuits. Our method can identify all errors in at-speed scan BIST environment without any aliasing and using only little extra overhead by way of a multiplexer and masking circuit for diagnosis. Our solution takes into account the relatively slower speed of the tester and the reload time of the expected data to the tester memory due to limited tester memory while reducing the test/debug cost. Experimental results show that the test application time by our method can be reduced by a factor of 10 with very little hardware overhead to achieve such advantage.