Increasing design complexities conspire to threaten long held assumptions about the predictability of design closure. Yield may no longer be dominated by process issues, but equally by unexpected and unpredicted design weaknesses. Structural test has been developed on the presumption that the main purpose of test is to detect localized manufacturing process defects. The unpredictability of design closure, by contrast, mainly affects parametric performance. One interesting question, hence, is to what extent structural test methods are capable of or can be extended to validate the parametric performance. We also explore how manufacturing test can evolve from being a simple pass/fail screen to becoming a capable contributor to continuous design-process characterization.