On Correlating Structural Tests with Functional Tests for Speed Binning of High Performance Design

The use of functional vectors has been an industry stan- dard for speed binning purposes of high performance ICs. This practice can be prohibitively expensive as the ICs become faster and more complex. In comparison, struc- tural patterns can target performance related faults in a more systematic manner. To make structural testing an ef- fective alternative to functional testing for speed binning, structural patterns need to correlate with functional test frequencies closely. In this paper, we investigate the cor- relation between functional test frequency and that of var- ious types of structural patterns on MPC7455, a Motorola processor executing to the PowerPC 1 instruction set architecture.