Fault Diagnosis in the BIST Environment Based on Bisection of Detected Faults

An optimized fault diagnosing procedure in Built-in Self-Test environment is proposed. Instead of bisection of patterns in pseudorandom test sequences, in the proposed bisection procedure the diagnostic information inherent in test patterns is taken into account. Another novelty is the sequential nature of the procedure which allows pruning the search space. Opposite to the classical approach which targets all failing patterns, in the proposed method not all failing patterns are needed to be fixed for diagnosis. The proposed method is compared with three known fault diagnosis methods: classical Binary Search, Doubling and Jumping. Experimental results have demonstrated the advantages of the proposed method compared to the known methods.