Shorts in self-checking circuits

It has been noted by several authors that the classical stuck-at logical fault model might not be an appropriate representation of certain real failures occurring in integrated circuits. Shorts are an important class of such faults. This article gives a detailed analysis of the effects of shorts in self-checking circuits and proposes techniques for dealing with them. More precisely, we show that, unlike other faults such as stuck-at, stuck-on, and stuck-open—which produce only single errors in the place they occur—shorts can produce double errors on the two shorted lines. In particular, feedback shorts can produce double errors on the two shorted lines. The double error is unidirectional for some feedback shorts and non-unidirectional for some others. Furthermore, in some technologies (e.g., CMOS), non-feedback shorts can also produce double non-unidirectional errors. We also show that unlike stuck-at, stuck-on, and stuck-open faults, redundant shorts can destroy the SFS property. Then we propose several techniques for coping with these problems and we illustrate the results by circuit implementation examples.The present study is given for NMOS and CMOS circuits but we show that it is valid for any other technology.