Logic Test Vehicles for High Resolution Diagnosis of Systematic FEOL/MEOL Yield Detractors

Test vehicles are important circuits for process yield learning at early stage. In-house customized standard cell libraries should also be evaluated from the yield perspective. In this paper, we propose novel logic test vehicles to offer high resolution diagnosis capability of in-house designed standard cell libraries. Both stuck-at and cell-aware faults are injected to evaluate the diagnosability of the test vehicles. Nearly ideal cell-level diagnosis results can be obtained to reflect the FEOL/MEOL yield detractors of the process technology under development. All standard cells in libraries are embedded in the test vehicles with even distributions. The designed test vehicles are compatible with commercial automatic physical design flow and have statistically significant area when limited volume of chips are considered.