Title
Accelerating post silicon debug of deep electrical faults
Abstract
With the growing complexity of current designs and shrinking time-to-market, traditional ATPG methods fail to detect all electrical faults in the design. Debug teams have to spend considerable amount of time and effort to identify these faults during post silicon debug. This work proposes off-chip analysis to speed-up the effort of identifying hard-to-find electrical faults that are not detected using conventional test methods, but cause the chip to crash during functional testing or silicon-bring-up. With the goal of reducing the search space for reconstructing the failure trace path, formal methodology is used to analyze the reachable states along the path. Isolating the root cause of failure is also accelerated. Moreover, we propose a forward traversal technique on selected few possible faults to generate a complete failure trace starting from the initial state to the crash state. Experimental results show that the proposed approach can lead to a 44% reduction in actual silicon run with a commensurate reduction in off-chip debug time.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1109/IOLTS.2013.6604052
IOLTS
Keywords
Field
DocType
reachable state analysis,electrical faults,forward traversal technique,failure trace path reconstruction,electrical fault detection,formal methodology,functional testing,fault tolerant computing,failure cause isolation,off-chip debug time reduction,silicon run reduction,failure analysis,off-chip analysis,silicon-bring-up,search space reduction,postsilicon debug method,formal verification,crash state,initial state,logic testing,algorithm design and analysis,silicon,computer bugs,logic gates
Crash,Automatic test pattern generation,Tree traversal,Computer science,Functional testing,Real-time computing,Chip,Root cause,Formal verification,Embedded system,Debugging
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1942-9398
0
0.34
References 
Authors
7
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Bao Le1244.14
Dipanjan Sengupta2554.22
A. Veneris393767.52
Zissis Poulos4669.30