A Low Overhead On-Chip Path Delay Measurement Circuit

Abstract

In this paper, we present a novel on-chip path delay measurement circuit for efficiently detecting and debugging of delay faults in the fabricated integrated circuits. Several delay stages are employed in the proposed circuit, whose delay ranges are increased by a factor of two gradually from the last to the first delay stage. Thus, the proposed method can achieve a large delay measurement range with a small quantity of delay stages. Experimental results show that a significant reduction in both delay measurement time and area overhead can be obtained compared to the previous Vernier Delay Line based delay measurement schemes. In addition, by conducting delay compensation, the proposed method can achieve both improved delay measurement resolution and measurement accuracy.