Bridge Defect Diagnosis with Physical Information

Circuit behavior in the presence of bridge defects is affected by three factors: bridge resistance, drive strength of bridged signals and the threshold voltages of downstream gates. Current bridge defect diagnosis methods either ignore all of these factors or consider drive strengths and/or threshold voltages only. Specifically, existing diagnosis methods have not considered the effect caused by bridge resistance. So the diagnosis results from current procedures may not be as accurate as possible. In this paper, we present a bridge defect diagnosis method taking all three factors into account. Experiments conducted on benchmark circuits and one industrial design demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve a very high diagnosis accuracy and resolution.