Generation of Compact Stuck-At Test Sets Targeting Unmodeled Defects

This letter presents a new method to generate compact stuck-at test sets that offer high defect coverage. The proposed method first selects the most effective patterns from a large N-detect repository, by using a new output deviation-based metric. Then it embeds complete coverage of stuck-at faults within these patterns, and uses the proposed metric to further improve their defect coverage. Results show that the proposed method outperforms a recently proposed competing approach in terms of unmodeled defect coverage. In many cases, higher defect coverage is obtained even than much larger N-detect test sets for several values of N. Finally, results provide the insight that, instead of using N-detect testing with as large N as possible, it is more efficient to combine the output deviations metric with multi-detect testing to get high-quality, compact test sets.