Fault Collapsing via Functional Dominance

A fault fj is said to dominate another fault fi if all tests for fi detect fj . When two faults dominate each other, they are called equivalent. Dominance and equivalence relations among faults around a Boolean gate are called structural" and are used for fault collapsing in large circuits. Some fault equivalences, that cannot be determined by the structural analysis, can be found by functional" equivalence relations. This paper gives a functional dominance" relation, which has not been described in the literature. Since the functional analysis is computationally expensive, it can only be applied to small circuits such as standard cells. A graph-theoretic hierarchical fault collapsing method from the recent literature can then collapse faults in any large cell-based circuit. It is found that the size of the dominance collapsed set for an exclusive-OR cell reduces to just four faults when functional dominance is considered. With the traditional method of structural colla...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: ITC
• Authors: Vishwani D. Agrawal, A. V. S. S. Prasad, Madhusudan V. Atre
• Keywords: Fault Collapsing Method, Faults, Functional Dominance, Hardware, ITC 2003