Total Critical Area Based Testing
Friedrich Hapke, P. Maxwell · 2018
This paper presents new methods and experimental production test results from completely moving away from traditional fault methods towards using critical area based methods instead. The focus of this paper is on measuring the quality of test patterns not by measuring the test coverage but by measuring the covered or detected total critical area (TCA). This is the first time that a TCA for all defects in the digital logic part of a chip can be calculated. The paper will present TCA figures from defect extraction on interconnects outside of standard cells as well as for all defects inside standard cells. We also will present methods for extracting cell-neighborhood defects, their TCA and which of those defects are not covered by cell-aware and interconnect test patterns.