Advances in semiconductor technology and design automation methods have introduced a new era for electronic products. With design sizes in millions of logic gates and operating frequencies in GHz, defects-per-million rates continue to increase, and defects are manifesting themselves in subtle ways. Traditional test methods are not sufficient to guarantee product quality and diagnostic programs cannot rapidly locate the root cause of failure in large systems. Therefore, there is a need for efficient fault diagnosis methods that can provide quality assurance, accelerate new product release, reduce manufacturing cost, and increase product yield.

This thesis research is focused on fault-insertion test (FIT) and fault diagnosis at the board and system levels. FIT is a promising technique to evaluate system reliability and facilitate fault diagnosis. The error-handling mechanism and system reliability can be assessed in the presence of intentionally inserted faults, and artificial faulty scenarios can be used as references for fault diagnosis. However, FIT needs to be deployed under constraints of silicon area, design effort, availability of equipment, and what is actually possible to test from one design to the next. In this research...

The semiconductor industry continues to relentlessly advance silicon technology scaling into the deep-submicron (DSM) era. High integration levels and structured design methods enable complex systems that can be manufactured in high volume. However, due to increasing integration densities and high operating speeds, subtle manifestation of defects leads to functional failures at the board level. Functional fault diagnosis is, therefore, necessary for board-level product qualification. However, ambiguous diagnosis results can lead to long debug times and wrong repair actions, which significantly increase repair cost and adversely impact yield.

A state-of-the-art diagnosis system involves several key components: (1) design of functional test programs, (2) collection of functional-failure syndromes, (3) building of the diagnosis engine, (4) isolation of root causes, and (5) evaluation of the diagnosis engine. Advances in each of these components can pave the way for a more effective diagnosis system, thus improving diagnosis accuracy and reducing diagnosis time. Machine-learning techniques offer an unprecedented opportunity to develop an automated and adaptive diagnosis system to increase diagnosis accuracy and speed. This dissertation targets all the above components of an advanced diagnosis system by leveraging various machine-learning techniques.

This thesis first describes a diagnosis system based on support-vector machines (SVMs)...