OPMISR: the foundation for compressed ATPG vectors

Rapid increases in the wire-able gate counts of ASICs stress existing manufacturing test equipment in terms of test data volume and test capacity. Techniques are presented in this paper that allow for substantial compression of Automatic Test Pattern Generation (ATPG) produced test vectors. We show compression efficiencies allowing a more than 10-fold reduction in tester scan buffer data volume on ATPG compacted tests. In addition, we obtain almost a 2/spl times/ scan test time reduction. By implementing these techniques for production testing of huge-gate-count ASICs, IBM will continue using existing automated test equipment (ATE)-avoiding costly upgrades and replacements.