Designing CMOS Circuits for Switch-Level Testability

Conventional testing techniques often fail to be effective for CMOS combinational circuits, since most of their switch-level faults cannot be detected by stuck-at-fault testing. The alternative is to design for testability. The design techniques presented here for fully testable CMOS combinational circuits use a three-pattern test scheme to detect both stuck-open and stuck-on switch-level faults. The circuit is implemented with specially designed gates that have no undetectable stuck-on faults. An inverting buffer is inserted between logic gates, and two FETs are added to each logic gate to make it testable for stuck-on faults.