As digital devices continue to increase in complexity, the number of patterns to be executed in a test program increases accordingly. Pattern sets provide a structure for users to execute a large number of patterns consecutively. These pattern sets may be atomic, consisting of individual patterns, or hierarchical, consisting of one or more atomic pattern sets. Executing large groups of patterns as a hierarchical pattern set offers benefits to overall test time. However, this introduces challenges in datalogging information and processing results for individual pattern set elements, specifically the atomic pattern sets which make up a hierarchical pattern set. Previous workarounds to circumvent these challenges have introduced overhead to the test program and in response, IG-XL has introduced new features to provide these capabilities with low overhead.

A new statement, TheHdw.Patterns.ExecuteSet, has been added to execute hierarchical pattern sets and return an array of IPatternSetResult objects. TheExec.Flow.FunctionalTestLimit (FTL) has also been enhanced to support logging Scan Test Record (STR). With the new statement and FTL, the user can datalog STR/FTR for each hierarchical pattern set element and within an element, the user can log FTR at the per-element or per-module level. The new language also allows the user to assign unique fail bins to individual elements and set the failing cycle capture limit per element. To further support these features, IG-XL has added new capabilities to the debug display tools including the Pattern Tool, Waveform Display, and Characterization Studio, which provide additional access for the user to debug individual elements of hierarchical pattern sets. By taking advantage of these new IG-XL features, users will receive the benefit of shorter test time while maintaining binning and datalogging granularity along with the ease of debugging individual tests.