Integrated Circuit Test Engineering: Modern Techniques

380 Pages·2005·2.841 MB·English

by  Ian A. Grout

Integrated Circuit Test Engineering
Ian A. Grout
Integrated Circuit
Test Engineering
Modern Techniques
With149Figures
123
IanA.Grout,PhD
DepartmentofElectronicandComputerEngineering
UniversityofLimerick
Limerick
Ireland
BritishLibraryCataloguinginPublicationData
Grout,Ian
Integratedcircuittestengineering:moderntechniques
1.Integratedcircuits-Verification
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ISBN-10:1846280230
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This book is dedicated to Jane.
Test
A procedure intended to establish the quality, performance or
reliability of something, especially before it is taken into widespread
use.
New Oxford English Dictionary
About the Author
Ian Grout is a lecturer within the Department of Electronic and Computer
Engineering at the University of Limerick, Ireland. He was born in London, UK in
1967, and earned his PhD from Lancaster University in 1994. He has worked
within the microelectronics field for several years, in particular Integrated Circuit
test research and education. He has been a lecturer at Limerick since 1998.
ix
Preface
The extensive use of electronic products in everyday life has only been made
possible with the advent of, and substantial advances in, the field of
microelectronic circuit engineering. The types of microelectronic circuits that can
be developed today provide for a complex circuit behaviour within a physically
small package. The advent of high-value, high-functionality portable electronic
systems such as the laptop computer, mobile phone and Personal Digital Assistant
(PDA), are testament to this. Since the successful demonstration of the transistor
back in 1947 by Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley at Bell Laboratories (USA), in
just over half a century the ability to create microelectronic circuits containing tens
of millions of transistors is a remarkable statement of achievement. The trend
towards increases in design complexity and speed of operation, coupled with the
need for improvements in the engineering processes utilised in order further to
reduce product costs, is leading to improvements in all aspects of device design,
fabrication and test. It is the field of test engineering that this book aims to identify
and discuss.
With the increased demands placed on test engineering activities within the
electronic, and in particular microelectronic, circuit and system development and
production (manufacturing) environments, the need to consider the importance of
developing the right circuit/system test procedure is critical to the commercial
success of a developed product. Test and evaluation activities provide an essential
input to the product development at a range of stages within a product development
cycle in that they:
• Provide insight into a design development activity from concept through
to implementation in order to ensure that the design can be adequately
tested once it has been manufactured/fabricated.
• Ensure devices that contain circuit faults due to problems with either the
design or fabrication are not perceived as “good devices”.
xi
xii Preface
• Provide the means to evaluate the operation of the design over a range of
operating conditions that may be encountered in a final application.
• Determine and guarantee the operating specifications that will be required
by the end-user.
• Allow for failures to be identified and the causes of the failures to be fed-
back to design and fabrication for appropriate corrective action to be
undertaken in order to eliminate the sources of the identified failures, and
reduce the risk of faulty devices being passed onto the customer.
The important role of test engineering is now widely acknowledged, such that the
test procedure (program) development process is now considered of equal
importance to that of design. Test requirements, once seen in many cases as an
afterthought and considered only once a design had been generated, are now in
many cases a prerequisite to the design activity, and test is now an active process
from design concept identification and specification through to high-volume
fabrication of the final product. This is due to a number of factors including the:
• Rapid increase in design complexity, particularly for digital systems
(more functionality per mm2 of silicon area).
• Utilisation of new fabrication processes (reduced geometries allowing for
the creation of smaller devices but which may suffer from fabrication
process variation problems leading to new device failure modes and an
increase in the fabricated device parameter variability).
• Increase in design performance (higher operating frequencies, greater
demands on design specifications).
• Need for more competitive products (the customer receiving devices with
superior performance at lower cost, given the availability of a greater
number of suppliers of the necessary technology).
• Need to test the operation of the fabricated device in a cost-effective
manner with the available test equipment, without the requirement to
acquire and utilise prohibitively high-cost test equipment.
• Need to enable the device to run self-test algorithms once in the final
application using additional circuitry built into the design (BIST: Built-In
Self-Test), and for this type of self-test to be independent of external
circuitry.
Over the last few years, the evolution of test has brought it closer to design,
bridging the “traditional” gap between design and test. Here, where once the
design and test activities were separate and distant in many aspects ranging from
the ultimate “end product” to the terminology used, the gap has been bridged with
Preface xiii
a unified “Design for Testability” (DfT) – sometimes referred to as “Design for
Test” - approach. Specialist engineers in design and test are supported with a more
generalist DfT engineer providing the ability to bridge the gap, but not necessarily
required to be a specialist in either field – the need for specialists is based on the
need for in-depth knowledge of specific design and test issues, roles which a single
person could not realistically be expected to undertake. The gap between design
and test expertise, leading to potential problems in a product development process,
is being replaced with this “Design for Testability” (DfT) link, providing the bridge
between the experts. This is coupled with the traditional boundary between digital
and analogue electronic circuits, a nice and neat separation of behaviour into logic
and voltage/current for design and analysis purposes, being eroded by the
requirements for true mixed-signal device operation. Digital, analogue and mixed-
signal DfT for devices ranging from a single operational amplifier through to the
latest generation microprocessor is a complex task requiring substantial knowledge
of design, test and the implications of both aspects on the other.
The purpose of this book is to discuss the range of requirements placed on the test
engineering activities and the test engineer within the rapidly changing
microelectronic circuit engineering environment, and to identify the methods
available to solving a range of test problem scenarios.
The book is presented as follows:
Chapter 1 provides an introduction to the role of test within the
electronic/microelectronic engineering environment and highlights a number of
key trends. The trends in test are highlighted, along with an overview of key
actions.
Chapter 2 provides an overview of the key fabrication processes. Whilst not
aimed at being an exhaustive review of the field, it is aimed at identifying key
aspects relating to test program development, in particular those relating to process
induced circuit failure modes and test program development following a defect
oriented approach.
Chapter 3 overviews test program development for digital logic, both
combinational logic and sequential logic. The principles identified here are
relevant for later discussions into System on a Chip (SoC) test program
development.
Chapter 4 introduces semiconductor memory structures and test procedures.
Traditionally, memories have been discrete packaged devices which, when utilised
with a suitable processor, develop the basic operation of a computer system.
Increasingly, the move towards higher levels of integration is leading to memories
being provided as macro cells for placement alongside other circuitry on the same
silicon die, leading towards System on a Chip (SoC) and System in Package (SiP)
solutions that require extensive use of memory.