Hyperactive Faults Dictionary to Increase Diagnosis Throughput

For volume production of VLSI designs in future technologies fast and accurate diagnosis of manufacturing defects on a large number of chips is necessary to ramp up yields. Methods to speed up commonly used effect-cause fault diagnosis procedures have been recently proposed. These include the use of fault response dictionary. However, for very large industrial designs, these methods either need very large dictionaries or they drastically reduce the speedup achievable by using dictionaries. In this work we propose a method to achieve higher speedup with small sized dictionaries. We achieve this by identifying a set of faults called hyperactive faults for which we create a novel dictionary. Experimental results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.