Observability-aware Directed Test Generation for Soft Errors and Crosstalk Faults

Post-silicon validation has emerged as an important component of any chip design methodology to detect both functional and electrical errors that have escaped the pre-silicon validation phase. In order to detect these escaped errors, both controllability and observability factors should be considered. Soft errors and crosstalk faults are two important electrical faults that can adversely affect the correct functionality of the chip. A major bottleneck with the existing approaches is that they do not consider the inter-dependence of the selected trace signals and test generation. In this paper, we explore the synergy between trace signal selection and observability-aware test generation to enable efficient detection of electrical errors including soft errors and crosstalk faults. Our experimental results demonstrate that our approach can significantly improve error detection performance - on an average 58% for crosstalk faults and 48% for soft errors compared to existing techniques.