Special ATPG to Correlate Test Patterns for Low-Overhead Mixed-Mode BIST

In mixed-mode BIST, deterministic test patterns are generated with on-chip hardware to detect the random-pattern-resistant (r.p.r.) faults that are missed by the pseudo-random patterns. While previous work in mixed-mode BIST has focused on developing hardware schemes for more efficiently encoding a given set of deterministic patterns (generated by a conventional ATPG procedure), the approach taken in this paper is to improve the encoding efficiency (and hence reduce hardware overhead) by specially selecting a set of deterministic test patterns for the r.p.r. faults that can be efficiently encoded. A special ATPG procedure is described for finding test patterns for the r.p.r. faults that are correlated (have the same logic value) in many bit positions. Such test patterns can be efficiently encoded with one of the many “bitfixing” schemes that have been described in the literature. Results are shown for different bit-fixing schemes which indicate dramatic reductions in BIST overhead can be achieved by using the proposed ATPG procedure to select which test patterns to encode.