An Efficient and Effective Methodology on the Multiple Fault Diagnosis

In this paper, we analyze failing circuits and propose a multiple-fault diagnosis approach. Our methodology has been validated experimentally and has proved to be highly efficient and effective in diagnosing multiple faults. We do not consider the multiple-fault behavior explicitly, but rather use an incremental simulation-based approach to diagnose failures one at a time. Furthermore, to improve the diagnosability, we propose a failing-primary-output partitioning algorithm. Experimental results show that our approach has approximately linear time complexity, and it achieves high diagnosability and resolution. Our approach has also been validated on data collected from manufactured chips. The diagnosis time is within minutes for real industrial chips that failed because of multiple faults.