A new structure for interconnect offline testing

Multigigahertz range of working frequency, shrinking of technology and loss of signal integrity put circuits´ interconnection at a higher risk of permanent or more frequent transient faults. These faults reduce overall reliability and performance of the circuit. Because of this, testing interconnects becomes an important issue. This paper presents an offline interconnect testing method that improves test time compared to some other earlier methods. The proposed method is implemented by a simple hardware structure, which has low hardware overhead and can detect crosstalk and other types of interconnect faults.