Recognition of catastrophic faults

For a given design, it is not difficult to identify a set of elements whose failure will have catastrophic consequence. There exist many patterns (random distribution) of faults, not in a block, which can be fatal for the system. Therefore, the characterization of such fault patterns is crucial for the identification, testing and detection of such catastrophic events. This paper, is concerned with the development of efficient recognition schemes; that is, efficient mechanisms which automatically determine whether or not an observed/detected pattern of faults will have catastrophic consequences. The problem of recognizing whether a fault pattern is catastrophic has been addressed