High-level test generation using physically-induced faults

A high-level fault modeling and testing philosophy is proposed which is aimed at ensuring full detection of lowlevel, physical faults, as well as the industry-standard single stuck-line (SSL) faults. A set of independent functional faults and the corresponding functional tests are derived (induced) from the circuit under test; of particular interest are SSL-induced functional faults or SIFs. We present, for the first time, complete functional circuit models and tests for representative 74X-series and ISCAS-85 benchmark circuits, and apply the proposed methodology to them. These examples demonstrate that functional testing can, with far less effort than conventional methods, produce test sets that provide complete coverage of SSL faults in practical circuits. Surprisingly, these test sets are also provably of minimal or near-minimal size.