Gate exhaustive testing

A gate exhaustive test set applies all possible input combinations to each gate in a combinational circuit, and observes the gate response at an observation point such as a primary output or a scan cell. In this paper, we analyze the effectiveness of the gate exhaustive test metric in detecting defective chips, and compare it with the single stuck-at fault, the N-detect, and the transition fault test metrics. Results from the Stanford CRC ELF35 and ELF18 test experiments show that gate exhaustive test sets are more efficient than single stuck-at and N-detect test sets in terms of the ability to detect defective chips and test length. It is also shown that test sets with higher values of the gate exhaustive coverage have better test quality