Techniques for SAT-based constrained test pattern generation

Testing of digital circuits seems to be a completely mastered part of the design flow, but Constrained Test Patterns Generation (CTPG) is still a highly evolving branch of digital circuits testing. Our previous research on CTPG proved that we can benefit from an implicit representation of test patterns set. The set of test patterns is implicitly represented as a Boolean formula satisfiability problem in CNF, like in common SAT-based ATPGs. However, the CTPG process can be much more memory or time consuming than common TPG, thus some techniques of speeding up the constrained SAT-based test patterns generation are described and analyzed into detail in this paper. These techniques are experimentally evaluated on a real SAT-based algorithm performing a test compression based on overlapping of test patterns. Experiments are performed on ISCAS'85, '89 and ITC'99 benchmark circuits. Results of the experiments are discussed and recommendations for further development of similar SAT-based tools for CTPG are given. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.