RTL-Based Functional Test Generation for High Defects Coverage in Digital Systems

Functional test has long been viewed as unfitted for high-quality production test. The purpose of this paper is to propose a RTL-based test generation methodology which can rewardingly be used both for design validation and to enhance the test effectiveness of classic, gate-level test generation. The proposed methodology leads to high Defects Coverage (DC) and to relatively short test sequences, thus allowing low-energy operation in test mode. The test effectiveness, regarding DC, is shown to be weakly dependent on the structural implementation of the behavioral description. The usefulness of the methodology is ascertained using the VeriDOS simulation environment and the CMUDSP and Torch ITC'99 benchmark circuits.