Estimating testability and coverage distributions of a VLSI circuit from a mixture of discrete and continuous functions
Hassan A. Farhat, M. Zand, Hossein Saiedian · 1992
The problem of test set generation of a VLSI circuit is known to be NP-complete.The detection probabtit y distribution of a given circuit aids in the teat, generation process.In thii paper a new method of estimating the testabtlty and the fimlt coverage distributions is presented.The advantagea of the presented work on previous related work is in the simplicity of computing the necessary parameters to predictthese distributiona.Testability is modeled as a mixture of a two linear continuous functions and a aeriti of discrete impulse fimctions.The statistical package Minitab is used in eMrnat_ ing the parameters of tedabiity.Prom the estimated parameters, a relationship between teatahiity and coverage is employed to estimate the coverage distribution.The significance of this work u in removing the need to employ fault simulation.experimental results on three of the large new ISCAS-89 circuits reflect the accuracy of this work.