Just-Enough Stress Test for Infant-Mortality Screening Using Speed Binning

Stress test has become increasingly more important to support reliability screening for safety-critical ICs. However, the amount of stress time that needs to be applied to an IC product is not only hard-to-decide but also too time-consuming. This paper formulates a Just-Enough Stress Test (JEST) method so that the stress time can be dramatically reduced without missing out on the weak devices with infant mortality tendency. Experimental results on examples based the on previously proposed failure time model in the literature indicate that the stress test time could be slashed significantly by an order of magnitude.