Test Generation for Interconnect Opens

Interconnect opens are one of major failure mechanisms in contemporary deep sub-micro designs. In this paper, we present three test generation methods, static dominant, dynamic dominant, and double observation, to generate the tests for the interconnect opens. The first two methods take the electrical behavior of the interconnect opens into consideration during test generation and the third method is applied when the parasitic capacitances between the open net and its neighboring nets are not dominant parameter to determine the voltage at the open net. The experimental results show that N-detection stuck-at test set and transition test set are not sufficient to achieve high test coverage on detecting interconnect opens, especially when the voltage at the interconnect open is determined by a large number of neighboring nets. The top-up test patterns generated by using proposed test generation methods help to improve the test quality on detecting interconnect open defects.