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Performance verification of high-performance ASICs using at-speed structural test

Published: 30 April 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Performance verification is becoming critical to high performance ASICs manufacturing. Performance verification ensures that only those ASICs whose performance is higher than an advertized threshold are shipped to demanding customers. This provides a means to weed out nominal performance ASICs, and also ship ASICs at difference grades. However, performance verification based on functional test requires high-functionality testers that can supply multiple asynchronous clocks. Additionally, functional test requires expensive testers that can operate at the speed of the fastest clock domain on the ASIC. As an alternative, at-speed structural test can provide performance verification capability at very low cost. However, existing structural test methods are inadequate because they are unable to supply sufficiently-varied functional clock sequences to test complex sequential logic. Moreover, they require tight restrictions on the circuit design. In this paper, we present a scalable and flexible structural test method for performance verification of GH-speed ASICs. The proposed method requires no tight restrictions on the circuit design. Moreover, low-cost testers are used, thus sharply reducing test cost.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      GLSVLSI '06: Proceedings of the 16th ACM Great Lakes symposium on VLSI
      April 2006
      450 pages
      ISBN:1595933476
      DOI:10.1145/1127908
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Published: 30 April 2006

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      Author Tags

      1. ASICs
      2. at-speed
      3. performance verification
      4. structural test

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      GLSVLSI06: Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI 2006
      April 30 - May 1, 2006
      PA, Philadelphia, USA

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