IC diagnosis: preventing wars and war stories

Firstly, ensure that the right design hooks for diagnosis are available. Mandate full scan in designs that comprise millions of gates. Diagnosis in partial scan or sequential circuits is certainly not a viable option with the limited observability that is available. Ensure that the design is IDDQtestable. Beyond these few design techniques that are primarily design-fortestability techniques, there is no immediate need for other sophisticated design for diagnosis techniques. For designs without scan, there is no doubt about the first step to avoid a war: add scan. For designs with scan, there is more to do than what is routinely done today. Advances are needed in modeling, software diagnosis algorithms and defect excitation; not in design.