Diagnosing Multiple Faulty Chains With Low Pin Convolution Compressor Using Compressed Production Test Set

Diagnosing chain failures is extremely important to ramp up production yield. Use of modern day low pin compressors limit the observability making chain diagnosis a difficult problem. When multiple chains fail during initial ramp up of yield, the high-resolution patterns are generally used for diagnosis. These patterns are generated using special ATPG settings and are very high in numbers. These high-resolution patterns burden the Automatic Test Equipment (ATE) with extra test time and test memory. In this work, we have developed a new algorithm to diagnose multiple chains using compressed production test pattern set. We believe that this is the first work which exhibits the use of production patterns to diagnose multiple chains. Diagnosing one chain at a time, this algorithm applies the information obtained so far to diagnose other chains. Experimental results show that up to 10 chains can be diagnosed simultaneously using compressed production patterns.