A theory of Error-Rate Testing

— We have entered an era where chip yields are decreasing with scaling. A new concept called intelligible testing has been previously proposed with the goal of reversing this trend for classes of systems which do not require completely error-free operation. Such error tolerant applications include audio, speech, graphics, video, and digital communications. Analyses of such applications have identified error rate as one of the key metrics for error severity, where error rate is defined as the percentage of vectors for which the value at outputs deviates from the corresponding error-free value. In error-rate testing, every fault with an error rate less than a threshold specified by the application is called an acceptable fault; all other faults are called unacceptable. The objective of error-rate testing is to detect every unacceptable fault while detecting none of the acceptable faults. In this paper we develop a theory of error-rate testing. First we study fanout-free circuits with p...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ICCD
• Authors: Shideh Shahidi, Sandeep Gupta
• Keywords: Classical Fault Simulator, Fault Equivalence, Hardware, ICCD 2006, Unacceptable Fault