Timing-aware ATPG for high quality at-speed testing of small delay defects

In this paper, a new ATPG methodology is proposed to improve the quality of test sets generated for detecting delay defects. This is achieved by integrating timing information, e.g. from Standard Delay Format (SDF) flies, into the ATPG tool. The timing information is used to guide the test generator to detect faults through the longest paths in order to improve the ability to detect small delay detects. To avoid propagating faults through similar paths repeatedly, a weighted random method is proposed to improve the path coverage during test generation. During fault simulation, a new fault-dropping criterion, named Dropping based on Slack Margin (DSM), is proposed to facilitate the trade-off between the test set quality and the test pattern count. The quality of the generated test set is measured by two metrics: delay test coverage and SDQL. The experimental results show that significant test quality improvement is achieved when applying timing-aware ATPG with DSM to industrial designs.