A Testing Approach for MOS Circuit Using Single-Photon Detectors Under High Magnetic Fields

The MOS circuits must be tested thoroughly for insuring the reliability. A new testing approach for MOS circuits is presented in this paper, which makes use of single-photon detectors and high magnetic fields. If there are faults in the circuit under test, the photon emission from the circuit components is detected by a single-photon detector, the faults are located by the amount of the emitted photons. The following two techniques are proposed in this paper. First, the high magnetic field is applied to the circuit under test, i.e., the circuit is put in high magnetic field environment. To some extent this technique can solve the problem that some faults have poor strengths of emitted photons under general environment. Second, the special circuit input vectors are designed by using binary decision diagrams. The input vectors can make the positions of circuit components to produce signal transitions or switching behaviors, therefore the photon emission strengths of circuit components are enhanced. A lot of experimental results show that the faults in MOS circuits can be tested accurately by the approach proposed in this paper.