Efficient ATPG for design validation based on partitioned state exploration histories

This paper introduces a new concept of state partitioning and state/transition exploration histories to generate test stimulus for the purpose of design validation. With our new state partitioning, during vector generation, state and transition exploration histories for each state group are maintained by dynamically constructing partial state transition graphs (STGs) for all state groups. By limiting a maximum size any state group can be, maintaining the complete state and transition exploration histories for each state group is feasible even for very large sequential circuits. While such histories are being collected, test vectors are generated using extracted spectral information from existing tests and genetic algorithm (GA) is used to explore new scenarios that are not in the histories. Experiments showed that much higher design error coverages together with smaller test sets are achieved with very short execution times.