On correlating structural tests with functional tests for speed binning

The utilization of functional vectors has been an industry standard for speed binning purpose. This practice can be prohibitively expensive as the ICs become faster and more complex. In comparison, structural patterns can target performance related faults in a more systematic manner. To make structural test an effective alternative to functional test for speed binning, structural patterns need to correlate with functional test frequency closely. In this paper, we demonstrate the correlations between the functional test frequency and that of various types of structural patterns on MPC7455, a Motorola processor executing to the PowerPC^™ instruction set architecture.