Physically-Aware N-Detect Test Relaxation

Physically-aware N-detect (PAN-detect) test has been demonstrated to improve defect detection for modern designs. One existing approach for PAN-detect test generation that is applicable for industrial designs generates fully-specified test sets. This work presents a PAN-detect test relaxation methodology that can be applied to both physically-aware test sets as well as arbitrary test sets. The methodology enhances PAN-detect test applicability by allowing test-input values to be unspecified as donpsilat cares, which can be utilized for test compression, scan-power reduction, and test enrichment. The test quality of the relaxed test set is maintained by preserving the PAN-detect coverage of the original test set. Experiment results demonstrate that the physically-aware N-detect test relaxation approach relaxes, on average, 42% of the test-input values while preserving PAN-detect coverage.