An ROBDD-Based Combinatorial Method for the Evaluation of Yield of Defect-Tolerant Systems-on-Chip

In this paper, we develop a combinatorial method for the evaluation of the functional yield of defect-tolerant systems-on-chip (SoC). The method assumes that random manufacturing defects are produced according to a model in which defects cause the failure of given components of the system following a distribution common to all defects. The distribution of the number of defects is arbitrary. The yield is obtained by conditioning on the number of defects that result in the failure of some component and performing recursive computations over a reduced ordered binary decision diagram (ROBDD) representation of the fault-tree function of the system. The method has excellent error control. Numerical experiments seem to indicate that the method is efficient and, with some exceptions, allows the analysis with affordable computational resources of systems with very large numbers of components.