Robust platform design in advanced VLSI technologies

The traditional paradigm of conservative design and thorough production testing is not sufficient for designing robust platforms in advanced VLSI technologies. Fundamentally new techniques are required for incorporating new design features for thorough testing, yield improvement, error detection and correction, self-recovery and repair. This represents a new direction in the 'design for' techniques in the areas of test, reliability and manufacturability. This paper presents an overview of two such techniques: a test compression technique for exponential reduction in test time and test data volume, and a built-in soft error resilience technique that enables more than 20-fold reduction in the susceptibility of system latches and flip-flops to radiation-induced transient errors.