A novel low-overhead delay testing technique for arbitrary two-pattern test application

Abstract — With increasing process fluctuations in nano-scale technology, testing for delay faults is becoming essential in manufacturing test to complement stuck-at-fault testing. Design-for-testability techniques, such as enhanced scan are typically associated with considerable overhead in die-area, circuit per-formance, and power during normal mode of operation. This paper presents a novel test technique, which can be used as an alternative to the enhanced scan based delay fault testing method, with significantly less design overhead. Instead of using an extra latch as in the enhanced scan method, we propose using supply gating at the first level of logic gates to hold the state of a combinational circuit. Experimental results on a set of ISCAS89 benchmarks show an average reduction of 33 % in area overhead with an average improvement of 71 % in delay overhead and 90% in power overhead during normal mode of operation, compared to the enhanced scan implementation. I