Automatic Test Pattern Generation for Digital Circuits

Digital circuits complexity and density are increasing and at the same time it should have more quality and reliability. It leads with high test costs and makes the validation more complex. The main aim is to develop a complete behavioral fault simulation and automatic test pattern generation (ATPG) system for digital circuits modeled in verilog and VHDL. An integrated Automatic Test Generation (ATG) and Automatic Test Executing/Equipment (ATE) system for complex boards is developed here. An approach to use memristors (resistors with memory) in programmable analog circuits. The Main idea consists in a circuit design in which low voltages are applied to memristors during their operation as analog circuit elements and high voltages are used to program the memristor’s states. This way, as it was demonstrated in recent experiments, the state of memristors does not essentially change during analog mode operation. As an example of our approach, we have built several programmable analog circuits demonstrating memristor -based programming of threshold, gain and frequency. In these circuits the role of memristor is played by a memristor emulator developed by us. A multiplexer is developed to generate a class of minimum transition sequences. The entire hardware is realized as digital logical circuits and the test results are simulated in Model sim software. The results of this research show that behavioral fault simulation will remain as a highly attractive alternative for the future generation of VLSI and system-on-chips (SoC).