This article presents a new real-world application of evolutionary computing in the area of digitalcircuits testing. A method is described which enables to evolve large synthetic RTL benchmark circuits with a predefined structure and testability. Using the proposed method, a new collection of synthetic benchmark circuits was developed. These benchmark circuits will be useful in a validation process of novel algorithms and tools in the area of digital-circuits testing. Evolved benchmark circuits currently represent the most complex benchmark circuits with a known level of testability. Furthermore, these circuits are the largest that have ever been designed by means of evolutionary algorithms. This work also investigates suitable parameters of the evolutionary algorithm for this problem and explores the limits in the complexity of evolved circuits.
In the paper a method for estimation the circuit testability on the Register Transfer Level (RTL) is presented. The method allows to perform fast testability estimation in linear time complexity (regarding the number of components and interconnects of the circuit). Proposed approach is based on utilization of controllability and observability measurement for estimation of overall circuit testability. The application of developed method is demonstrated in a software tool for the development of RTL benchmark circuits with predefined testability properties. The resultsgained by our testability analysis method are compared with the results of professional ATPG tool. Experiments show the good correlation of the results obtained by our method and professional ATPG tool with significantly lower time complexity when our algorithm is used.
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