Training Insights – Want to Learn How to Test the Design and Its Need?

1 Dec 2023 • 2 minute read

Why is Design for Testability (DFT) crucial for VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) design?

Keeping testability in mind when developing a chip makes it simpler to find structural flaws in the chip and make necessary design corrections before the product is shipped to users.

The DFT process might take many hours, days, or even weeks due to the increasing design complexity of today's system on chips. Techniques for DFT offer ways to examine the manufactured devices for quality and coverage thoroughly. DFT gives manufacturers the assistance they need to keep up with the growing demand and the pressure of mass manufacturing. For complex applications, it aids in producing chips with flawless design and outstanding performance.

Defects are errors, glitches, or mistakes in the manufacturing process that produce a chip that does not behave exactly as expected. Defects are presumed to cause incorrect behavior, later if not immediately, and therefore must be rejected.

For a design that has moved from a Hardware Description Language (HDL) through gate-level netlist to silicon, the manufacturing test compares the behavior of the gate-level netlist to the observed behavior of the manufactured silicon.

The goals of manufacturing tests in the chips are:

To reject defective modules
Minimize test escapes
Maximize yield
Monitor and improve the manufacturing process

Want to learn more about the basics of testing and its advantages? We can also organize this “Design for Test Fundamentals” training for you as “Blended” or “Live” training. Please reach out to Cadence Training for further information.

Log on to Cadence.com with your registered Cadence ID and password.
Select Learning from the menu > Online Courses.
Search for "Functional safety implementation and verification" using the search bar.
Select the course and click "Enroll"

After completing the course, you can take the exam, and when you pass the exam, you will receive a badge that you can display on social media.

Videos related to the DFT concepts, which can be useful and be watched whenever you want on the Cadence Learning and Support portal