Built In Test for VLSI: Pseudorandom Techniques

Preface

This book is an outgrowth of the notes that we developed for our tutorial on built-in test at the International Test Conference and owes much to our interaction with and feedback from our audiences. It is a handbook for the experienced professional test engineer and an introduction to built-in testing for graduate students as well as for management and technical leaders. We have collected here all of the relevant topics relating to random pattern (or more properly pseudorandom pattern) built-in test. As with many emerging topics, those who contribute to this field work in several different disciplines, so the notation and the mathematical treatment varies from source to source. A major effort has been made to provide a consistent treatment of the theory and its mathematics.

Chapters 1 and 2 are introductory material used to motivate and set a standard for built-in test. Chapter 1 discusses and describes the problems with conventional testing in light of the growth in complexity of digital circuits, and Chapter 2 reviews the principles of design for testability as a point of departure for the sequel.

From this base, we continue with four chapters on test sequence generation and response data compression. In Chapter 3, on pseudorandom sequence generators, the mathematics of ...