VLSI Test Principles and Architectures

Chapter 1. Introduction

Yinghua MinInstitute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

Charles StroudElectrical and Computer Engineering, Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama

About this Chapter

The introduction of integrated circuits (ICs), commonly referred to as microchips or simply chips, was accompanied by the need to test these devices. Small-scale integration (SSI) devices, with tens of transistors in the early 1960s, and medium-scale integration (MSI) devices, with hundreds of transistors in the late 1960s, were relatively simple to test. However, in the 1970s, large-scale integration (LSI) devices, with thousands and tens of thousands of transistors, created a number of challenges when testing these devices. In the ...