A Method on Improving Fault Coverage of Semiconductor Test Patterns using a Distance Function

In this paper, we proposed a new and novel method to improve the fault coverage of random test patterns based on the distance function. The proposed patterns consists of pseudorandom and antirandom patterns. Antirandom patterns are generated by calculating hamming distance among candidates and pseudorandom patterns are by H/W logic such as LFSR. Experimental result shows the proposed method can improve the fault coverage by more than 30% for up to 200 cases compared to the pseudorandom pattern group and antrandom pattern group. Since the proposed method generates new patterns using only the relationships between predetermined patterns, it can be easily implemented with on-chip hardware, so we expect it can be widely adopted as a highly efficient DFT technology for random testing along with LFSR. © 2024 Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers. All rights reserved.