As the feature sizes of deep sub-micron (DSM) chips decreases, and the operating frequencies goes into multi-GHz an interconnect starts behaving as a transmission line, thus crosstalk effects are induced between circuit elements which could be defined as the leakage of signal from one conductor to another due to their capacitive and inductive couplings. Crosstalk noise may cause undesirable effects including excessive overshoot, undershoot, glitches, additional signal delay as well as signal speed-up. Currently there is no standard test method that could detect the logic faults related to crosstalk between interconnects which is the main factor of signal integrity faults. Testing of crosstalk faults has to deal with firstly excitation of the crosstalk effect which is an analog noise or time varying signal, secondly propagating this effect to circuit lines where it can manifest itself as logic errors and lastly propagating this logic error to observable outputs.

Contact:
Shehzad Hasan (hasan@item.uni-bremen.de)