Research On Off-Line Debugging Of VLSI Device Test Programs

The significant density and performance improvement of VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) devices has brought with it new and major problems in device design, manufacturing and testing, resulting in an exponential increase in both device design time and device test program development time.Removing an automatic VLSI test system from production testing to develop a test program thus incurs significant costs. Now, with longer and longer device test program development time as well as more and more expensive test systems, if the test program is debugged on such an expensive test system, the whole process of the test program development will become much more costly and time consuming. So, there is a necessity to provide an off-line method for test programs debugging which leaves the test system available for its primary work — production testing, to achieve a dramatic cost reduction.Debugging is still a bottleneck in programming. Aside from the development of debugging tools, the activity of debugging has received relatively little attention. There is little formal theory of debugging, and attempts to develop a methodology of debugging are rare.The aim of the investigation in this dissertation is to creat a theory to support debugging of device test programs, and then, on the basis of this theory, design and develop an off-line debugging environment for VLSI de-...