A syndrome signature for exhaustive testing of combinational circuits

The authors propose a syndrome signature particularly well suited for exhaustive testing of VLSI circuits. Given an n-input combinational circuit, a syndrome signature is defined by an (n+1)-element vector consisting of the primary syndrome of the function as originally defined by J. Savir (1980) and n other subsyndromes corresponding to the subfunctions obtained by setting each of the n input variables to 0. A multiple-output syndrome signature generation is also discussed that preserves all the desirable properties of the single-output response analyzers. The signature generators can be easily implemented using the current VLSI technology