A novel capture-safety checking method for multi-clock designs and accuracy evaluation with delay capture circuits

Excessive capture power in at-speed scan testing may cause yield loss due to timing failures. Although reducing the number of clock domains that capture test responses simultaneously is a practical and scalable solution for reducing capture power, no available capture-safety checking metric can assess its effect in an accurate-enough manner, especially when multiple clock domains capture test responses in a short period of time. This paper proposes a novel CLEAR (CLock-Edge-Arrival-Relation-based) capture-safety checking method that, for the first time, takes clock edge arrival times for different clock domains into consideration. The accuracy and usefulness of the proposed method have been clearly demonstrated by simulation-based evaluation with the largest ITC´99 benchmark circuit as well as real-chip-based evaluation with an industrial chip embedded with on-chip delay measurement circuitry.