Path Delay Test Generation Toward Activation of Worst Case Coupling Effects

As the feature size scales down, crosstalk noise on circuit timing becomes increasingly significant. In this paper, we propose a path delay test generation method toward activation of worst case crosstalk effects, in order to decrease the test escape of delay testing. The proposed method performs transition-map-based timing analysis to identify crosstalk-sensitive critical paths, followed by a deterministic test generation process. Using the transition map instead of the timing window to manage the timing information, the proposed method can identify many false coupling sites and thus reduce the pessimism in crosstalk-induced fault collection caused by inaccurate timing analysis. It can also efficiently calculate the accumulative crosstalk-induced delay, and find the sub-paths which cause worst case crosstalk effects during test generation. By converting the timing constraints of coupling lines into logic constraints, complex timing processing for crosstalk effect activation is avoided during test generation. In addition, the tradeoff between accuracy and efficiency can be explored by varying the size of timescale used in the transition map.