Circuit Failure Prediction by Field Test - A New Task of Testing

The main task of test had traditionally been screening of hard defects before shipping. However, current chips are taking risk of field reliability with rapidly reducing marginality due to increasing process variations and degradation mechanisms. Therefore, effective methodologies that guarantee quality in the field are strongly required. The talk will firstly survey the related works, then, discuss the required features that differentiate field testing from traditional production testing, and finally, introduce a novel testing mechanism for high field reliability. The proposed testing will predict a circuit failure caused by degradation, and the system will be able to avoid sudden failure, which would have caused a catastrophic damage in field.