Cell Oriented Fault Simulation

Currently, in most fault simulators physical defects have to be modeled as stuck-at faults in networks of primitive gates such as AND, NAND etc. Especially for complex gates this modeling technique is rather inexact. In this paper, a fault simulation approach supporting a more powerful and variable fault model is presented. Speciication of faults is done in a cell oriented manner. To achieve maximum exibility, the set of basic cells and their failure modes are not coded into the algorithm but can be speciied by the user in a library. For the special case of compiler driven fault simulation it is shown that this increased exibility does not degrade the performance of the simulator but, in contrast, results in a considerable speed-up (up to factor 35).