On-line testing for VLSI: state of the art and trends

This paper discusses the state of the art and future trends of on-line test ing techniques for VLSI. It cautions that emerging technological constraint s and application requirements will expend dramatically the use of these te chniques. In particularly, various industrial (e.g. railway control, satell ites, avionics, telecommunications, control of critical automotive function s, medical electronics, industrial control, etc.), have increasing needs of various on-line testing features. Some of these applications concern mass production and should support the standardization of such techniques and th e development of commercial CAD tools supporting them. Furthermore, drastic device shrinking and increasing operating speeds that accompany the techno logical evolution to deeper submicron, reduces significantly the noise marg ins and increases dramatically the soft error rates. As a consequence, tech nological progress will be blocked quickly if no particular actions are und ertaken to cope with increasingly high soft-error rates. The paper will discuss these emerging requirements and problems and describ e on-line testing techniques that could provide adequate solutions. (C) 199 8 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.