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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Dr
Usha
Mehta
25-01-2022
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
Dr
Usha
Mehta
25-01-2022
4. Murphy’s Law…….
- Edward Murphy, An American aerospace engineer who worked
on safety-critical systems
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Dr
Usha
Mehta
25-01-2022
23. Intel Pentium Floating Point
Division Bug
• Because of the bug, the processor might
return incorrect binary floating point results
when dividing a number.
• Claimed by Professor Thomas R. Nicely
at Lynchburg College.
• Intel confirmed the error in missing entries
in the lookup table used by the floating-
point division circuitry.
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Dr
Usha
Mehta
25-01-2022
24. • 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
• In December 1994, Intel recalled the
defective processor
• In January 1995, Intel claimed loss of $475
million, the total cost associated with
replacement of the flawed processors.
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Dr
Usha
Mehta
25-01-2022
Intel Pentium Floating Point
Division Bug……..
25. Some famous disasters
as a result of Testing Failure
• Intel’s Floating Point Division Bug
• Disney’s Lion King
• NASA Mars Polar Lander
• Patriot Missile Defence System
• The Y2K Bug
• Loss of Revenue
• Loss of Reputation
• Loss of Human
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Dr
Usha
Mehta
25-01-2022
26. 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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Dr
Usha
Mehta
25-01-2022
27. 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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Dr
Usha
Mehta
25-01-2022
28. 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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Usha
Mehta
25-01-2022
29. Tester…..
From Production House point of view…..
“Bug-free Design”
does not give any extra revenue
Testing delays Time-to-Market
and
adds extra cost component
but
bugs in design are very costly!!!!
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Dr
Usha
Mehta
25-01-2022
30. • 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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Dr
Usha
Mehta
25-01-2022
Respin….
65 % of chips fail at first silicon
Tester…..
From Production House point of view…..
33. Why testing is so important…..
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Dr
Usha
Mehta
25-01-2022
• Does testing directly generate any
revenue?
• Does designer like testing?
• Does it generate “trust” ?
• Does trust generate “reusability”?
• Does reusability generate “revenue”?
34. 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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Dr
Usha
Mehta
25-01-2022
[Courtesy: ITRS]
35. 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.
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Dr
Usha
Mehta
25-01-2022
36. Why each fabricated IC to be tested?
• Defective Parts Per Million (DPPM):key
metrics used to measure quality in
many semiconductor segments
• For mission-critical segments such as
automotive and medical : DPPB (Per
Billion)
• For a premium vehicle
• more than 7,000 semiconductor devices
• If you assume a DPPM rate of 1 for all the
semiconductor devices
• it equates to seven failures for every
1,000 cars
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Dr
Usha
Mehta
25-01-2022
37. DPM and Test Coverage
• Considering DPM=100 means 100 bad ICs
out of 1000,000 are escaping the test
• It means in 1000,000, there are 100 bad
ICs and 999,900 good Ics
• Test Coverage =
999,900/1000,000=99.99%
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Dr
Usha
Mehta
25-01-2022
38. Yield and DPM
• Assuming 10% yield and manufactured
ICs are 1000,000
• 100,000 good IC, 900,000 bad ICs
• Considering 99.99% test coverage
• It means 0.01% faulty ICs are shipped
• It means 90 ICs out of 900,000 bad ICs
escaped the test and shipped along
100,000 good ICs.
• Now in 100,090 ICs, 90 ICs are
defective
• Almost 900 DPM
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Dr
Usha
Mehta
25-01-2022
39. For Technology with smaller
Geometry
• For Digital
• 100 to 1000 DPM
• For Analog and Mission Critical
• Zero DPM
• For 10nm Technology, 20% yield for
many years for Intel
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Dr
Usha
Mehta
25-01-2022