PADLOC: Physically-Aware Defect Localization and Characterization
Soumya Mittal, R. D. Blanton · 2017
Software-based diagnosis examines the failing-circuit design and test response to identify potential defect locations and if possible, pinpoint the root cause of failure. This paper describes a generalized physically-aware methodology called PADLOC (Physically-Aware Defect LOcalization and Characterization) to improve the quality of diagnosis. PADLOC consists of (a) identifying the subnets that are more likely to correspond to the actual defect, and (b) deriving the defect behavior based on the activity of the neighborhood (i.e., nets that are physically close and logically related). Results from 6,000 defect injection experiments reveal that 97.2% of the defects are accurately diagnosed with 92.6% of defects achieving a logical resolution of at most five and 27.6% of defects attaining perfect resolution. PADLOC has an average resolution of 2.6 and improves resolution for 24.8% of defects over prior work. In addition, the physical resolution (i.e., number of subnets) is improved for 61.3% of defects. Finally, PADLOC returns 33.9 fewer subnets per defect and reduces the number of subnets by 44.8%.