Helix Scan: A Scan Design for Diagnosis

Scan design is a widely used design-for-testability technique to improve test quality and efficiency. For the scan-designed circuit, test and diagnosis of the scan chain and the circuit is an important process for silicon debug and yield learning. However, conventional scan designs and diagnosis methods abort the subsequent diagnosis process after diagnosing the scan chain if the scan chain is faulty. In this work, we propose a design-for-diagnosis scan strategy called helix scan and a diagnosis algorithm to address this issue. Unlike previous proposed methods, helix scan has the capability to carry on the diagnosis process without losing information when the scan chain is faulty. What is more, it simplifies scan chain diagnosis and achieves high diagnostic resolution as well as accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our design.