Effective Diagnostic Pattern Generation Strategy for Transition-Delay Faults in Full-Scan SOCs

Nanometric circuits and systems are increasingly susceptible to delay defects. This paper describes a strategy for the diagnosis of transition-delay faults in full-scan systems-on-a-chip (SOCs). The proposed methodology takes advantage of a suitably generated software-based self-test test set and of the scan-chains included in the final SOC design. Effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed approach were evaluated on a nanometric SOC test vehicle including an 8-bit microcontroller, some memory blocks and an arithmetic core, manufactured by STMicroelectronics. Results show that the proposed technique can achieve high diagnostic resolution while maintaining a reasonable application time.