An Efficient Procedure to Generate Highly Compact Diagnosis Patterns for Transition Faults

Abstract

This article presents a diagnosis pattern generation procedure that not only can generate very compact diagnosis patterns to distinguish nonequivalent transition faults, but also can identify equivalent (EQ) transition faults efficiently. This procedure mainly consists of two major methods: 1) a user-defined-fault-based inactivation method that transforms the problem of distinguishing all transition faults into that of detecting a set of user-defined faults and then deals with all these faults at a time by using an ATPG tool and 2) a unified fault-pair transformation method that transforms the problem of distinguishing two transition faults into the problem of detecting a transition fault and then process all these faults also in one ATPG run. By these two methods, very compact diagnosis pattern sets can be obtained. For the very few fault pairs that cannot be handled by these two methods due to ATPG backtracking limit, we employ a SAT-based method to deal with these pairs and show that they are all EQ-fault pairs. Experimental results on ISCAS’89 and IWLS’05 benchmark circuits show that this is the first work that can distinguish all distinguishable transition faults and identify all EQ transition faults for ISCAS’89 and IWLS’05 benchmark circuits.