A Unified Approach to Test Generation and Test Data Volume Reduction

In this paper, we propose a unified approach to test generation, test stimulus compression, and test response compaction. By integrating virtual models of the decompressor and the compactor with the CUT, a standard ATPG tool can be used to generate compressed tests and their corresponding compacted responses as a unified process. In comparison with the existing solutions which treat them as separate tasks, this unified approach could potentially achieve a higher fault coverage and obtain higher input compression and output compaction ratios. Such a unified approach also offers better flexibility for evaluating various test volume reduction architectures. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method