The Carnegie Mellon Laboratory for Integrated System Test (CM-LIST) is led by Professors Maly and Blanton and consists of about ten Ph.D. students. We are part of the Center for Silicon System Implementation (CSSI) within the ECE department of the Engineering College of Carnegie Mellon University. We have formal collaborations with industrial counterparts from IBM, LSI Logic, and Freescale Semiconductor. Our work is also supported by government agencies and industrial consortia that include the National Science Foundation, the Semiconductor Research Corporation, and MARCO's (Microelectronics Advanced Research Corporation) Center for Circuits and Systems Solutions (C2S2).

Our research work in CM-LIST is focused on enhancing test from a go/no-go only endeavor to one that provides feedback about the design, the process, and their interaction. Specifically, we are developing design- and process-specific test methodologies to maximize knowledge extraction from the silicon product for meeting and maintaining yield and quality objectives. Various projects focus on different aspects of this vision and include:

Distinguishing Test Generation for Arbitrary Faults
An automatic test generation tool is developed that can generate tests to distinguish faults of arbitrary types.

Physically-Aware Test
N-detect test sets are generated based on circuit constraints on signal lines in close physical proximity to a line affected by an arbitrary defect. Test sets are applied to a 90nm industrial chip.

Statistical Test Compaction
A statistical learning based methodology is developed for eliminating tests for a non-digital device while maintaining the product quality and lowering yield loss.

Testing for Emerging Technologies
A built-in self-test technique is presented for chemically-assembled electronic nanotechnology circuits.

Automated Standard Cell Library Analysis for Improved Defect Modeling
A mapping between internal nodes of a standard cell and the logic level is created. The mapping is used to identify appropriate activation and error propagation conditions for internal node defects.

Exploiting Regularity for Inductive Fault Analysis
By performing inductive fault analysis on smaller blocks of regular circuits, the most likely faults can be extracted from even very large designs.

Extraction of Defect Density and Size Distributions from Wafer Sort Test Results
Defect density and size distributions, key parameters to characterize a manufacturing process are extracted using only product IC test results.

Diagnosis-Based Failure Analysis
Neighborhood-aware diagnosis is used as a preliminary failure analysis methodology to reduce the time spent in silicon debug.

Built-In Self-Test for MEMS Tunable Capacitor
A self-test technique is used that electrically analyzes the mechanical symmetry of a MEMS tunable capacitor (a component of an RF system) to detect failures due to defects and local fabrication variations.

Contact
Shawn Blanton [email]
Wojciech Maly [email]

Mailing Address:
Carnegie Mellon
ECE Department
Hamerschlag Hall
5000 Forbes Ave
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
USA