Diagnosing CMOS bridging faults with stuck-at fault dictionaries

It is shown that the traditional approach to diagnosing stuck-at faults with fault dictionaries generated for stuck-at faults is not appropriate for diagnosing CMOS bridging faults. A novel technique for using stuck-at-fault dictionaries to diagnose bridging faults is described. Teradyne´s LASAR was used to simulate bridging and stuck-at faults in a number of combinational circuits, including parity trees, multiplexers, and the 74ASCI181 4-b, 16-function ALU (arithmetic and logic unit). When the traditional technique was used, between 30%-50% of the bridging faults were mis-diagnosed, with the presence of a failure indicated on a fault-free node. In addition, as the stuck-at-fault diagnostic ability of a test increased, the bridging fault diagnostic ability decreased. By use of the new technique. over 92% of the bridging faults in the circuits used for this research were diagnosed correctly and less than 4% led to misleading diagnoses