VLSI Testing
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- Last Updated: Monday, 03 October 2022 23:13
- Published: Monday, 03 October 2022 23:13
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VLSI Testing;
This section deals with all aspects of testing a chip. When a chip is being fabricated and ready to use, how do we know that the chip does everything that's supposed to do. One way is to use it the wy user is supposed to use, and check if you get expected output. 50 years back, this might have been easy. Now with billions of transistors on chip, it's almost impossible. So, we develop a mechanism to not only test the chip, but also be able to debug it, in case it malfunctions while in the field.
There are various ways to achieve our testing goals. I list a few of them here:
- DFT: Here our purpose is to test the chip when it's being produced. This is called DFT or Design for Testability. We have separate section for DFT.
- JTAG: On top of DFT, we also have JTAG that allows testing the chip, when chip goes wrong in the field, and we wnt to debug it while it's running. This helps us to debug exactly where things went wrong. We talk about JTAG also in a separate sub section.