Incremental diagnosis of multiple open-interconnects

With increasing chip interconnect distances, open-interconnect is becoming an important defect. The main challenge with open-interconnects stems from its non-deterministic real-life behavior In this work, we present an efficient diagnostic technique for multiple open-interconnects. The algorithm proceeds in two phases. During the first phase, potential solution sets are identified following a model-free incremental diagnosis methodology. Heuristics are devised to speed up this step and screen the solution space efficiently. In the second phase, a generalized fault simulation scheme enumerates all possible faulty behaviors for each solution from the first phase. We conduct experiments on combinational and full-scan sequential circuits with one, two and three open faults. The results are very encouraging.