Static test compaction for synchronous sequential circuits based on vector restoration

Abstract

We propose a new static test compaction procedure for synchronous sequential circuits. The procedure belongs to the class of procedures that omit test vectors from a given test sequence in order to reduce its length without reducing the fault coverage. The previous procedure that achieved high levels of compaction using this approach attempted to omit test vectors from a given test sequence one at a time or in subsequences of consecutive vectors. The omission of each vector or subsequence required extensive simulation to determine the effects of each omission on the fault coverage. The procedure proposed here first omits (almost) all the test vectors from the sequence, and then restores some of them as necessary to achieve the required fault coverage. The decision to restore a vector requires simulation of a single fault. Thus, the overall computational effort of this procedure is relatively low. The loss of compaction compared to the scheme that omits the vectors one at a time or in subsequences is small in most cases. Techniques to speed-up the restoration process are also investigated, including consideration of several faults in parallel during restoration, and the use of a parallel fault simulator. Experimental results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of vector restoration as a static compaction technique.