Diagnostic fault simulation for synchronous sequential circuits

Abstract

In this paper, a time and memory-efficient diagnostic fault simulator for sequential circuits is first presented. A distributed diagnostic fault simulator is then presented based on the sequential algorithm to improve the speed of the diagnostic process. In the sequential diagnostic fault simulator, the number of fault-pair output response comparisons has been minimized by using an indistinguishability fault list that stores the faults that are indistinguishable from each fault. Due to the symmetrical relationship of the fault-pair distinguishability, fault list sizes are reduced. Therefore, the different diagnostic measures of a given test set can be generated very quickly using a small amount of memory. To further speed up the process of finding the indistinguishable fault list for each fault, a distributed approach is proposed and developed. The major idea for this approach is that each processor constructs the indistinguishable fault lists for a certain percentage of faults only. Experimental results show that the sequential diagnostic fault simulator runs faster and uses less memory than a previously developed one and that the distributed algorithm even achieves superlinear speedup for a very large sequential benchmark circuit, s35932. To the authors' knowledge, no distributed diagnostic fault simulation system for sequential circuits has been proposed before.