As VLSI designs grow in complexity and size, errors become more frequent and difficult to track. Recent developments have automated most of the verification tasks but debugging still remains a resourceintensive, manually conducted procedure. This paper bridges this gap as it develops robust automated debugging methodologies that complement verification processes. Unlike prior debugging techniques, the proposed one exploits the hierarchical nature of modern designs to improve the performance and quality of debugging. It also formulates the problem in terms of Quantified Boolean Formula Satisfiability to obtain dramatic reduction in memory requirements which allows for debugging of large designs. Extensive experiments conducted on industrial and benchmark designs confirm the efficiency and practicality of the proposed approach.
Abstract-Logic optimization is the step of the very large scale integration (VLSI) design cycle where the designer performs modifications on a design to satisfy different constraints such as area, power, or delay. Recently, automated test pattern generation (ATPG)-based design rewiring techniques for technology-dependent logic optimization have gained increasing popularity. In this paper, the authors propose a new operational framework to design rewiring that uses ATPG and diagnosis algorithms. They also examine its complexity requirements and discuss different implementation tradeoffs. To perform this study, the authors reduce the problem of design rewiring to the process of injecting a redundant set of multiple pattern faults. This formulation arrives at a new set of results with theoretical and practical applications. Experiments demonstrate the competitiveness of the approach and motivate future work in the area.
This paper presents an overview of the problem of testing semiconductor random access memories (RAMs). An important aspect of this test procedure is the detection of permanent faults that cause the memory to function incorrectly. Functional-level fault models are very useful for describing a wide variety of RAM faults. Several fault models are &scussed throughout the paper, including the stuck-at-0/1 faults, coupled-cell faults, and single-cell pattern-sensitive faults. Test procedures for these fault models are presented and their fault coverage and execution times are discussed. The paper is intended for the general computer scmnce audience and presupposes no background in the hardware testing area.
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