On the detection of board delay faults through the execution of functional programs

In the last years, the phenomenon of electronic products passing all tests by the manufacturer but failing in the field (No Fault Found, or NFF) attracted the attention of industries and researchers. Delay faults are supposed to be among the contributors to this phenomenon. Hence, companies are increasingly adopting functional test as a final step, which is expected to detect this kind of defects. This paper investigates the capabilities of detecting delay faults by several types of functional test, and proposes a method to write functional test programs able to detect most of the delay faults on the connections between the CPU and the memory.