On speeding-up vector restoration based static compaction of test sequences for sequential circuits

We propose a technique to speed up restoration-based static test sequence compaction for synchronous sequential circuits. The proposed algorithm reverses the order of the test vectors during restoration. Specifically, every time a subsequence of T is restored to detect a subset of faults, the subsequence is placed cat the end of the compacted sequence denoted by T-p. In this way, a fault detected by T-p is guaranteed to remain detected by T-p at the end of the compaction process, and need not be resimulated as was the case with some of the earlier restoration based compaction methods. Experimental results presented in this paper demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed procedure.