The progression developed in this book is essential to understand new test methodologies, algorithms and industrial practices. Without the insight into the physics of nano-metric technologies, it would be hard to develop system-level test strategies that yield a high IC fault coverage. Obviously, the work on defect-oriented testing presented in the book is not final, and it is an evolving field with interesting challenges imposed by the ever-changing nature of nano-metric technologies. Test and design practitioners from academia and industry will find that Defect-Oriented Testing for Nano-Metric CMOS VLSI Circuits lays the foundations for further pioneering work.

The history of this book begins way back in 1982. At that time a research proposal was filed with the Dutch Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter concerning research to model defects in the layer structure of integrated circuits. It was projected that the results may be useful for yield estimates, fault statistics and for the design of fault tolerant structures. The reviewers were not in favor of this proposal and it disappeared in the drawers. Shortly afterwards some microelectronics industries realized that their survival may depend on a better integration between technology-and design-laboratories. For years the "silicon foundry" concept had suggested a fairly rigorous separation between the two areas. The expectation was that many small design companies would share the investment into the extremely costful Silicon fabrication plants while designing large lots of application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC's). Those fabrication plants would be concentrated with only a few market leaders.

With the fast advancement of CMOS fabrication technology, more and more signal-processing functions are implemented in the digital domain for a lower cost, lower power consumption, higher yield, and higher re-configurability. This has recently generated a great demand for low-power, low-voltage A/D converters that can be realized in a mainstream deep-submicron CMOS technology. However, the discrepancies between lithography wavelengths and circuit feature sizes are increasing. Lower power supply voltages significantly reduce noise margins and increase variations in process, device and design parameters. Consequently, it is steadily more difficult to control the fabrication process precisely enough to maintain uniformity. The inherent randomness of materials used in fabrication at nanoscopic scales means that performance will be increasingly variable, not only from die-to-die but also within each individual die. Parametric variability will be compounded by degradation in nanoscale integrated circuits resulting in instability of parameters over time, eventually leading to the development of faults. Process variation cannot be solved by improving manufacturing tolerances; variability must be reduced by new device technology or managed by design in order for scaling to continue. Similarly, within-die performance variation also imposes new challenges for test methods. In an attempt to address these issues, Low-Power High-Resolution Analog-to-Digital Converters specifically focus on: i) improving the power efficiency for the high-speed, and low spurious spectral A/D conversion performance by exploring the potential of low-voltage analog design and calibration techniques, respectively, and ii) development of circuit techniques and algorithms to enhance testing and debugging potential to detect errors dynamically, to isolate and confine faults, and to recover errors continuously. The feasibility of the described methods has been verified by measurements from the silicon prototypes fabricated in standard 180nm, 90nm and 65nm CMOS technology.

The history of this book begins way back in 1982. At that time a research proposal was filed with the Dutch Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter concerning research to model defects in the layer structure of integrated circuits. It was projected that the results may be useful for yield estimates, fault statistics and for the design of fault tolerant structures. The reviewers were not in favor of this proposal and it disappeared in the drawers. Shortly afterwards some microelectronics industries realized that their survival may depend on a better integration between technology-and design-laboratories. For years the "silicon foundry" concept had suggested a fairly rigorous separation between the two areas. The expectation was that many small design companies would share the investment into the extremely costful Silicon fabrication plants while designing large lots of application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC's). Those fabrication plants would be concentrated with only a few market leaders.

The 2nd edition of defect oriented testing has been extensively updated. New chapters on Functional, Parametric Defect Models and Inductive fault Analysis and Yield Engineering have been added to provide a link between defect sources and yield. The chapter on RAM testing has been updated with focus on parametric and SRAM stability testing. Similarly, newer material has been incorporated in digital fault modeling and analog testing chapters. The strength of Defect Oriented Testing for nano-Metric CMOS VLSIs lies in its industrial relevance.

With the fast advancement of CMOS fabrication technology, more and more signal-processing functions are implemented in the digital domain for a lower cost, lower power consumption, higher yield, and higher re-configurability. This has recently generated a great demand for low-power, low-voltage A/D converters that can be realized in a mainstream deep-submicron CMOS technology. However, the discrepancies between lithography wavelengths and circuit feature sizes are increasing. Lower power supply voltages significantly reduce noise margins and increase variations in process, device and design parameters. Consequently, it is steadily more difficult to control the fabrication process precisely enough to maintain uniformity. The inherent randomness of materials used in fabrication at nanoscopic scales means that performance will be increasingly variable, not only from die-to-die but also within each individual die. Parametric variability will be compounded by degradation in nanoscale integrated circuits resulting in instability of parameters over time, eventually leading to the development of faults. Process variation cannot be solved by improving manufacturing tolerances; variability must be reduced by new device technology or managed by design in order for scaling to continue. Similarly, within-die performance variation also imposes new challenges for test methods. In an attempt to address these issues, Low-Power High-Resolution Analog-to-Digital Converters specifically focus on: i) improving the power efficiency for the high-speed, and low spurious spectral A/D conversion performance by exploring the potential of low-voltage analog design and calibration techniques, respectively, and ii) development of circuit techniques and algorithms to enhance testing and debugging potential to detect errors dynamically, to isolate and confine faults, and to recover errors continuously. The feasibility of the described methods has been verified by measurements from the silicon prototypes fabricated in standard 180nm, 90nm and 65nm CMOS technology.