IDDQ Testing of VLSI Circuits

Power supply current monitoring to detect CMOS IC defects during production testing quietly laid down its roots in the mid-1970s. Both Sandia Labs and RCA in the United States and Philips Labs in the Netherlands practiced this procedure on their CMOS ICs. At that time, this practice stemmed simply from an intuitive sense that CMOS ICs showing abnormal quiescent power supply current (I_DDQ) contained defects. Later, this intuition was supported by data and analysis in the 1980s by Levi (RACD,...