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1. Covering Test Holes of Functional Broadside Tests

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3441282  

   Pomeranz, Irith ( February 2021 , ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems)

   null (Ed.)

   Functional broadside tests were developed to avoid overtesting of delay faults. The tests achieve this goal by creating functional operation conditions during their functional capture cycles. To increase the achievable fault coverage, close-to-functional scan-based tests are allowed to deviate from functional operation conditions. This article suggests that a more comprehensive functional broadside test set can be obtained by replacing target faults that cannot be detected with faults that have similar (but not identical) detection conditions. A more comprehensive functional broadside test set has the advantage that it still maintains functional operation conditions. It covers the test holes created when target faults cannot be detected by detecting similar faults. The article considers the case where the target faults are transition faults. When a standard transition fault, with an extra delay of a single clock cycle, cannot be detected, an unspecified transition fault is used instead. An unspecified transition fault captures the behaviors of transition faults with different extra delays. When this fault cannot be detected, a stuck-at fault is used instead. A stuck-at fault has some of the detection conditions of a transition fault. Multicycle functional broadside tests are used to allow unspecified transition faults to be detected. As a by-product, test compaction also occurs. The structure of the test generation procedure accommodates the complexity of producing functional broadside tests by considering the target as well as replacement faults together. Experimental results for benchmark circuits demonstrate the fault coverage improvements achieved, and the effect on the number of tests. 

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2. Target Faults for Test Compaction Based on Multicycle Tests

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3375278  

   Pomeranz, Irith ( March 2020 , ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems)

   null (Ed.)

   The use of multicycle tests, with several functional capture cycles between scan operations, contributes significantly to the ability to compact a test set. Multicycle tests have the added benefit that they can contribute to the detection of defects with complex behaviors that are not detected by single-cycle or two-cycle tests. To ensure that this benefit is materialized when test compaction is applied to transition faults, this article suggests to incorporate into the test compaction procedure an additional fault model whose fault coverage increases when multicycle tests are used. To ensure that the computational complexity of test compaction is not increased by a fault model with a large number of faults, or faults with complex behaviors, the added fault model is required to have the same characteristics as the transition fault model. A type of transition fault called unspecified transition fault satisfies these requirements. The article describes a test compaction procedure for transition faults that incorporates unspecified transition faults, and presents experimental results for benchmark circuits to demonstrate the levels of test compaction and fault coverage that can be achieved. 

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3. Diagnostic Test Generation that Addresses Diagnostic Holes

   Pomeranz, I ( January 2018 , IEEE transactions on computer-aided design of integrated circuits and systems)

   A diagnostic test generation procedure targets fault pairs in a set of target faults with the goal of distinguishing all the fault pairs. When a fault pair cannot be distinguished, it prevents the diagnostic test set from providing information about the faults, and consequently, about defects whose diagnosis would have benefited from a diagnostic test for the indistinguishable fault pair. This is referred to in this paper as a diagnostic hole. The paper observes that it is possible to address diagnostic holes by targeting different but related fault pairs, possibly from a different fault model. As an example, the paper considers the case where diagnostic test generation is carried out for single stuck-at faults, and related bridging faults are used for addressing diagnostic holes. Considering fault detection, an undetectable single stuck-at fault implies that certain related bridging faults are undetectable. The paper observes that, even if a pair of single stuck-at faults is indistinguishable, a related pair of bridging faults may be distinguishable. Based on this observation, diagnostic tests for pairs of bridging faults are added to a diagnostic test set when the related single stuck-at faults are indistinguishable. Experimental results of defect diagnosis for defects that do not involve bridging faults demonstrate the importance of eliminating diagnostic holes. 

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4. Equivalent Faults under Launch-on-Shift (LOS) Tests with Equal Primary Input Vectors

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3440013  

   Pomeranz, Irith ( April 2021 , ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems)

   null (Ed.)

   A recent work showed that it is possible to transform a single-cycle test for stuck-at faults into a launch-on-shift (LOS) test that is guaranteed to detect the same stuck-at faults without any logic or fault simulation. The LOS test also detects transition faults. This was used for obtaining a compact LOS test set that detects both types of faults. In the scenario where LOS tests are used for both stuck-at and transition faults, this article observes that, under certain conditions, the detection of a stuck-at fault guarantees the detection of a corresponding transition fault. This implies that the two faults are equivalent under LOS tests. Equivalence can be used for reducing the set of target faults for test generation and test compaction. The article develops this notion of equivalence under LOS tests with equal primary input vectors and provides an efficient procedure for identifying it. It presents experimental results to demonstrate that such equivalences exist in benchmark circuits, and shows an unexpected effect on a test compaction procedure. 

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5. Schmidt hammer and terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) used to detect single‐event displacements on the Pleasant Valley fault (Nevada, USA)

   https://doi.org/10.1002/esp.4748  

   Stahl, Timothy ; Tye, Alexander ( December 2019 , Earth Surface Processes and Landforms)

   Changes in surface roughness on carbonate fault scarps often reflect varying durations of subaerial weathering. On the Pleasant Valley fault in central Nevada, the documentation of a surface rupture in 1915, a long recurrence interval of faulting, slow weathering rate, and a relatively high (2–3 m) single‐event displacement make the discrimination of the historical and penultimate slip patches unambiguous. Following from a 2018 study, we used a Schmidt hammer and terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) to further test whether these weathering patterns delineate exposed slip patches on a fault scarp. Results show that Schmidt hammer rebound value ranges (termed ΔR– the difference between minimum and maximumR‐values in repeat impacts at a point), increase by ~8–10 points across the historical–penultimate event transition zone in two separate scarp transects. TLS‐derived surface roughness also indicates a clear difference between the most recent and penultimate events. The average single‐event displacement (SED) estimated using the Schmidt hammer and TLS is 2.85 m at two transect sites and is roughly equivalent to the visually estimated 3 m. While this fault is an ideal case where we know some of the slip history, the results demonstrate that these techniques show promise for discriminating slip patches on larger carbonate fault scarps with longer paleoearthquake histories, and could be used alongside³⁶Cl cosmogenic exposure‐age dating to improve paleoseismic records on normal faults. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

    

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