Extracting precise diagnosis of bridging faults from stuck-at fault information

Abstract

Although the stuck-at fault model is the standard fault model. the frequently occurring faults in some technologies arc unintentional shorts, denoted as bridging faults. We outline a method that utilizes the information from the stuck-at fault model to accurately diagnose the bridging faults that affect two lines. The proposed method exploits the observation that the bridging fault response matches the stuck-at fault responses on the shorted lines for the failing test vectors and generates a candidate list that accounts for all failures. A further reduction in the size of the candidate set is achieved by extracting information from the test vectors that do not fail. The proposed method uses no layout information whatsoever. Nonetheless, the experimental results indicate that the bridging faults can be accurately diagnosed delivering a reduction in the sizes of the ambiguity sets and full capture of the offending bridging fault.