• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.7-12
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• 2003

The purpose of testability analysis is to estimate the difficulty of testing a stuck-at fault in logic circuits. A good testability measurement can give an early warning about the testing problem so as to provide guidance in improving the testability of a circuit. There have been researches attempting to efficiently compute the testability analysis. Conventional testability measurements, such as COP and SCOAP, can calculate the testability value of a stuck-at fault efficiently in a tree-structured circuit but may be very inaccurate for a general circuit. The inaccuracy is due to the ignorance of signal correlations for making the testability analysis linear to a circuit size. This paper proposes an efficient method for computing testability analysis, which takes into account signal correlation to obtain more accurate testability. The proposed method includes the algorithm for identifying all reconvergent fanouts in a given n circuit and the gates reachable from them, by which information related to signal correlation is gathered.

• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.30 no.2
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• pp.99-107
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• 2003

This paper proposes a design for testability (DFT) and testability analysis method for register-transfer level (RTL) circuits. The proposed method executes testability analysis - controllability and observability - on the RTL circuit and determines the insertion points to enhance the testability. Then with the associated priority based on the testability, we insert only a few of the test multiplexers resulting in minimized area overhead. Experimental results shows a higher fault coverage and a shorter test generation time than the scan method. Also, the proposed method takes a shorter test application time required.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.41 no.5
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• pp.81-90
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• 2004

This paper presents new testability measure based on learning, which can be useful in the deterministic process of test pattern generation algorithms. This testability measure uses the structural information that are obtained by teaming. The proposed testability measure searches for test pattern that can early detect the conflict in case of the hardest decision problems. On the other hand in case of the easiest decision problem, it searches for test pattern that likely results in the least conflict. The proposed testability measure reduces CPU time to generate test pattern that accomplishes the same fault coverage as that of the distance-based measure.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics
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• v.18 no.5
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• pp.30-34
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• 1981

This paper deals with the testability evaluation method for the digital systems. This method uses two factors: the complexity and the accessibility. The complexity depends on the ratio in combinational and sequential circuits, number of input/output terminals, and the circuit count by using the gate input level method. The accessibility is how easily to handle the data from I/O terminals. The system testability has a normalized value. Thus, analyzing the testability evaluation, and redesigning the circuit to improve testability, the systems increase interests for the maintenance and have high reliability. Finally, in comparison with Stephenson and Grason's technique, this technique gives sufficiently accurate results for much less computation effort.

• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.29 no.6
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• pp.361-368
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• 2002

This paper presents a new data path synthesis algorithm which takes into account simultaneously three important design criteria: testability, design area, and total execution time. We define a goodness measure on the testability of a circuit based on three rules of thumb introduced in prior work on synthesis for testability. We then develop a stepwise refinement synthesis algorithm which carries out the scheduling and allocation tacks in an integrated fashion. Experimental results for benchmark and other circuit examples show that we are able to enhance the testability of circuits with very little overheads on design area and execution time.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 1998.06a
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• pp.875-878
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• 1998

In this thesis, we present efficient techniques to reduce the switching activity in a CMOS combinational logic network based on local logic transforms. But this techniques is not appropriate in the view of testability because of deteriorating the random pattern testability of a circuit. This thesis proposes a circuit design method having two operation modes. For the sake of power dissipation(normal operation mode), a gate output switches as rarely as possible, implying highly skewed signal probabilities for 1 or 0. On the other hand, at test mode, signals have probabilities of being 1 or 0 approaching 0.5, so it is possible to exact both stuck-at faults on the wire. Therefore, the goals of synthesis for low power and random pattern testability are achieved. The hardware overhead sof proposed design method are only one primary input for mode selection and AND/OR gate for each redundant connection.

• Journal of Electrical Engineering and information Science
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.8-13
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• 1998

Often ESOP(Exclusive Sum of Products) expressions provide more compact representations of logic functions and implemented circuits are known to be highly testable. Motivated by the merits of using XOR(Exclusive-OR) gates in circuit design, ESOP(Exclusive Sum of Products) expressions are considered s the input to the logic synthesis for random pattern testability. The problem of interest in this paper is whether ESOP expressions provide better random testability than corresponding SOP expressions of the given function. Since XOR gates are used to collect product terms of ESOP expression, fault propagation is not affected by any other product terms in the ESOP expression. Therefore the test set for a fault in ESOP expressions becomes larger than that of SOP expressions, thereby providing better random testability. Experimental results show that in many cases, ESOP expressions require much less random patterns compared to SOP expressions.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics C
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• v.35C no.11
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• pp.11-20
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• 1998

Testability analysis computes controllabilities and observabilities of all lines of a circuit and then evaluates fault coverage. The values of controllability and observability as well as fault coverage produced by testability analysis are used for applications of testability analysis. ITEM was evaluated as a fault coverage tool. But the values of controllability and observability at all lines of circuits must be estimated as a performance measure of testability tools for another application such as partial scan. In this paper, partial scan method based on sensitivity analysis which estimates relative improvement of detectability of circuits after scanning a flip-flop is used for performance evaluation of ITEM. Performance of ITEM, with respect to testability values on each net, has been measured by comparing ITEM and STAFAN. Partial scan performance achieved by ITEM is very similar to that of STAFAN, but ITEM takes less CPU time. Therefore ITEM is very efficient for partial scan application because ITEM runs faster for very large circuits in which execution time is critical.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.15 no.9
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• pp.745-752
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• 1990

This paper deals with the path sensitization algrithm from PI to PO center on the nodes of high testability mainstay when CUT is tested by pseudo exhaustive testing. In CUT, the node definition of high testability mainstay treats the testability values of the entire nodes with the population composed of the raw data, and after we examined the level of significance(1-a) region, we accomplished in the estimation of the confidence interval of the testability. Focusing on the defined nodes of high testability mainstay, we performed the singular cover and consistency operation to the forward and backward logic gates. Thus, we easily generated the pseudo exhausitve test patterns. As a result, (1-a) region has 0.1579 and the pseudo exhaustive test patterns are least generated and the rate of test pattern is 1.22%, compared with exhaustive testing. (1-a) region has 0.2368 and this results exhibits the optimal performance of the singular cover and consistency operation. Applying the generated pseudo exhaustive test patterns to the stuck-at faults existing on the inputs and internal nodes in CUT, we verified this performance on the output. Thus, it is confirmed that functional testing of the proposed path sensitization algorithm is very useful.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics A
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• v.32A no.4
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• pp.75-84
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• 1995

Fault simulators are used for accurate evaluation of fault coverages of digital circuits. But fault simulation becomes time and memory consuming job because computation time is proportional to wquare of size of circuits. Recently, several approximate algorithms for testability analysis have been published to cope with the problems. COP is very fast but cannot be used for sequential circuits, while STAFAN can ve used for sequential circuits but requires large amount of computation because it utilizes logic simulation results. In this paper EXTASEC(An Extension of Testability Analysis for Sequential Circuits) is proposed. It is an extension of COP in the sense that it is the same as COP for combinational circuits, but it can handle sequential circuits, Xicontrollability and backward line analysis are key concept for EXTASEC. Performance of EXTASEC is proven by comparing EXTASEC with a falut simulator, STAFAN, and COP for ISCAS circuits, and the result is demonstated.