On testing high-performance custom circuits without explicit testing of the internal faults

When testing high-performance custom designs, the implementation models for these designs can often be missing or only available late in a design cycle. To facilitate test preparation for these designs and to ensure their test quality, this paper studies ATPG approaches whose resulting test quality are less design model dependent. These ATPG approaches do not depend on the internal implementation structure of a design and utilizes multiple detection techniques to achieve the desired test quality. As a result, test quality results are transferable from one model representation to another. For high-performance custom designs, we discover that without explicit testing of the internal faults, an ATPG is able to deliver better quality performance than traditional model-dependent approaches. Experience and experimental results from a recent Motorola high-performance microprocessor is reported and discussed.