2. Acknowledgement…..
This presentation has been summarized from
various books, papers, websites and
presentations on VLSI Design and its various
topics all over the world. I couldn’t item-wise
mention from where these large pull of hints and
work come. However, I’d like to thank all
professors and scientists who created such a
good work on this emerging field. Without those
efforts in this very emerging technology, these
notes and slides can’t be finished.
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3. Agenda
• Philosophy of Testing
• Why to test
• Do you love to be tested?
• Where do bugs come from?.
• When to test
• When should be your test scheduled?
• How to test
• Verification and Testing in context of
VLSI Design 3
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4. Murphy’s Law…….
- Edward Murphy, An American aerospace engineer who worked
on safety-critical systems
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25. • Intel, producer of the affected chip,
claims that the common user would
experience it once every 27,000 years
while IBM, manufacturer of a chip
competing with Intel's Pentium, claims
that the common user would experience
it once every 24 days
• Loss of $475 million
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29. If testing is so important, why do
people not test it thoroughly?
• To save money
• To save time
• To hide the inefficiencies
• ….
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30. Tester…from Designer point of view…..
• The relationship between the tester and
everyone else in the project team has
been like ….
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31. Why so love-hate relationship?
Can you prove the lion exists ?
Can you prove the ghost does exits ? Or does
not exist?
Testing can only show
the presence of errors,
never their absence.
-Edsger Djikstra
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32. Tester…..
From Production House point of view…..
“Bugfree Design”
does not give any extra revenue
but
bugs in design are very costly!!!!
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33. • Costly re-spin(s)
• Companies may miss out
market window
• Large companies can have
reputation at stake – e.g.
Pentium Bug
• Smaller companies can
have hard to recover
financial implications
• For start-ups, their
existence itself can be at
stake!
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Respin….
65 % of chips fail at first silicon
Tester…..
From Production House point of view…..
36. Even though…..
testing is important…..
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• Does testing directly generate any
revenue?
• Does designer like testing?
• Does it generate “trust” ?
• Does trust generate “reusability”?
• Does reusability generate “revenue”?
37. Why testing is of too much
importance in today’s
semiconductor world…..
• In Earlier days, design had all the
glamour and testing was considered to
be a dirty job, but now…
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[Courtesy: ITRS]
38. Testing and Verification in Current
Scenario
• While the silicon capacity continues to increase along the
Moore’s law, the efforts required to verify these designs have
increased even a greater rate : doubling roughly every six to
nine months.
• In the era of multimillion gate Asics, reusable IPs, and SoC
designs, 70% of the total efforts consumed by verification
and testing.
• Number of verification, validation, testing engineer is three
the number of RTL design engineer
• When design projects are completed, test benches makes up
80% of the total code volume.
• Most of the job openings in India is in this
field.
• Design Hubs in Ahmedabad/Gujarat???
• Verification Hubs in
Ahmedabad/Gujarat???
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42. • Design Errors
• Misinterpretation of specification
• Fabrication Errors
• Wrong component
• Incorrect Wiring
• Fabrication Defects
• Imperfect Process Variations
• Physical Failure
• During life time of a system
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42
45. Role of Testing in General
• Verification
• will any fault occur?
• Validation
• will fault occur during mass production?
• Detection
• Is there any fault? Yes or no?
• Diagnosis
• Where is the fault?
• Device Characterization
• Why the fault occurred? (Is design wrong or test process wrong?)
• Failure Mode Analysis (FMA)
• How that fault can be prevented? (Is manufacturing process wrong?)
• Burn-In
• Will it work for longer life?
• Speed Binning
• What is the speed of device?
• Acceptance Testing/Incoming Inspection
• Should I use it in my system?
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46. Verification
• Verifies the correctness of Design
• Performed once prior to manufacturing
process
• Performed by simulation, hardware
emulation or formal methods
• Responsible for quality of design
• Like sonography used for unborn baby
during pregnancy
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47. Validation
Verification Testing/Characterization / Design Debug
• After the first lot of prototypes are
manufactured, IC goes through, design
validation/pilot-run stage.
• It checks that either the fabrication process
was correct and fabricated IC is correct. ( Here
it is assumed that design was error free)
• Also verifies the correctness of test procedure.
• AC, DC, Functional Test
• Probing internal chip nodes also
• Special tools like scanning electron
Microscope, electron beam scanner, artificial
intelligent technique etc, are used
• Like Newborn sreening tests for baby
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48. Diagnosis
• Identify the fault that exists in system.
• Which fault is there (type of fault)?
• Where is that fault (fault location)?
• Like after a set of pathological test, the
doctor diagnosis your disease.
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49. Device Characterization
• Determination and correction of errors
in device and/or test procedure
• So that the next lot of IC will be error
free.
• Like doctor writes a prescription of
medicine to cure your disease.
• Here there is a difference between man
and IC!!!!!!!!!
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50. Failure Mode Analysis
• Why/How/when the fault had occurred?
• Determine the manufacturing process
errors that may have caused the fault.
• Like determining why that disease
occurred and find the preventive actions
(bad health /food habits) which created
disease
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51. Detection (testing in general…)
• Does any of the fault exists?
• Which, why, how, where, when is out of scope here.
• Only YES/NO. Go/No Go test for IC to be shipped to market
or not.
• At fabrication unit
• For all fabricated IC
• Less comprehensive than characterization
• Test should have high fault coverage, low cost and minimum
test time
• Are you completely fit? Does any of the disease
there?
• Like medical test for army ( if fit then go, otherwise
no go)
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52. Burn-In/Stress Test
• To stress the chip to accelerate the
failure mechanism
• Some chip passes the production test
but will fail very quickly thereafter
• To increase temp and/or voltage while
applying test patterns
• Infant Mortality Failures: 10-30 Hrs
• Freak Failure: 100-1000Hrs
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53. Acceptance Testing/
Incoming Inspection
• Customer performs this test
• Like universal tester to test the IC at our
Digital Electronics Labs
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54. Place of Verification in Design Flow
• Specification
• Finalization of
specification
• Behavioural
Description/RTL code
• Functional Verification
• Gate level netlist
• Static timing analysis
• Circuit level
• Propagation delay
• Physical Domain
• Layout vs Schematic
(LVS)
• During Fabrication
• Wafer testing
• Pilot lot production
• Validation
• Mass production
• Testing
• Burn-In
• Speed Binning
• Yield loss
• Diagnosis
• Failure Mode
Analysis
• Before use
• Acceptance/Incomin
g Testing
• In-System
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55. Verification
• On Design
(functionality,
estimated speed)
• Pre-silicon
• One time
• Methods:
• Simulation
• Emulation
• formal methods
• A Design Bug
• Makes all Fabricated
IC useless
Detection/Testing
• On Device
(manufactured
hardware)
• Post-Silicon
• On all ICs, i.e. every
time IC is fabricated
• Methods:
• Test Generation
• Test Application
• A fabrication defect
• May cause all ICs or
Some of the ICs
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62. Mid Test….
Calculate the time required to test a 64 bit
adder at the speed of 1 GHz
64 bit adder => 129 inputs, 65 outputs
• Is it possible????????????????????????
• The manufacturing house wants to complete
it into few mins only. 62
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