A Delay Measurement Technique Using Signature Registers

This paper proposes a delay measurement technique using signature registers, and a scan design for delay measurement utilizing the proposed delay measurement technique to detect small-delay defects. The delay of circuits can be measured with the scan design with lower area, smaller data volume, and shorter measurement time than with the conventional scan design for delay measurement. Accordingly, the small-delay defects outside the range of the normal-distributed delay are detected with lower cost. Evaluation with 0.18 ¿m process shows that the area overhead of the proposed scan design is 32.2% smaller than that of the conventional method. The measurement time and the data volume for the measurement are reduced 66.7% and 66.0% compared with the conventional method, respectively.