A New Scan Chain Fault Simulation for Scan Chain Diagnosis

In this paper, we propose a new symbolic simulation for scan chain diagnosis to solve the diagnosis resolution problem. The proposed scan chain fault simulation, called the SF-simulation, is able to analyze the effects caused by faulty scan cells in good scan chains. A new scan chain fault simulation is performed with a modified logic ATPG pattern. In this simulation, we consider the effect of errors caused by scan shifting in the faulty scan chain. Therefore, for scan chain diagnosis, we use the faulty information in good scan chains which are not contaminated by the faults while unloading scan out responses. The SF-simulation can tighten the size of the candidate list and achieve a high diagnosis resolution by analyzing fault effects of good scan chains, which are ignored by most previous works. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.