A small-delay defect detection technique for dependable LSIs

As continuous process scaling produces large-scale chips, small-delay defects become one of the major chip-reliability limiters. Small-delay defect detection techniques for LSI screening have been developed, which can successfully detect outlier chips among normally-distributed chips in a short testing time. In our experiments with 90 nm CMOS 100 MHz test chips, we have successfully detected around 1-ns path-delay shift caused by small-delay defects in only 1/25 of testing time.