Diagnosing at-speed scan BIST circuits using a low speed and low memory tester

Numerous solutions have been proposed to reduce test data volume and test application time during manufacturing testing of digital devices. However, time to market challenge also requires a very efficient debug phase. Error identification in the test responses can become impractically slow in the debug phase due to large debug data, slow tester speed and limited memory of the tester. In this paper, we investigate how a relatively slow and limited memory tester can observe the at-speed behavior of fast circuits. Our method can identify all errors in at-speed scan BIST environment without any aliasing and negligible extra hardware while taking into account the relatively slower speed of the tester and the re-load time of the expected data to the tester memory due to limited tester memory. Experimental results show that the test application time by our method can be reduced by a factor of 10 with very little hardware overhead to achieve such advantage.