Improving the Accuracy of Defect Diagnosis by Considering Fewer Tests

Experimental results indicate that the addition of diagnostic tests to a fault detection test set may sometimes result in a larger set of candidate faults. Experimental results also indicate that a defect diagnosis procedure does not require the complete observed response of a faulty chip in order to produce accurate diagnosis results. Motivated by these observations, this paper augments a defect diagnosis procedure with a process that removes from consideration tests whose effects on the results of diagnosis may be negative. The augmented procedure runs the underlying defect diagnosis procedure several times in order to decide which tests should be removed from consideration. Experimental results indicate that this results in smaller sets of candidate faults and improved accuracy of diagnosis.