Study on Automatic Test Generation of Digital Circuits Using Particle Swarm Optimization

The development of digital integrated circuit has put forward urgent demands for test technology. Test technology has become a bottleneck in the application of LSI/VLSI. Especially for sequential circuits, it is still a problem which is not resolved completely in theory. By making use of the structure information of circuits, a method of automatic test generation for sequential circuits based on Particle swarm optimization is presented, which is performed by two steps, initialization and fault detection. Experimental results show that the approach can achieve high fault coverage, and CPU times needed for test generations are very short, which shows that it is a method deserving research.