Bridging fault diagnosis to identify the layer of systematic defects

Diagnosis for systematic defects is very critical for yield learning in nanometer technology. This paper presents a bridging fault diagnosis which identifies a single layer of systematic defects (LSD), where more than expected numbers of bridging faults are located. The proposed technique is a layout-aware diagnosis which contains bridging pair extraction, structural analysis, and layer-oriented covering. Instead of treating each failing CUT independently, a statistical method (Z-test) is applied to diagnose all CUTs simultaneously. Experiments on six of seven large ISCAS'89 benchmark circuits successfully diagnose LSD for single bridging fault as well as multiple bridging faults.