Towards Increasing Test Compaction Abilities of SAT-based ATPG through Fault Detection Constraints

Automatic Test Pattern Generation (ATPG) based on Boolean Satisfiability (SAT) is a robust alternative to classical structural ATPG. Due to the powerful reasoning engines of modern SAT solvers, SAT-based algorithms typically provide a high test coverage because of the ability to reliably classify hardto-detect faults. However, a weak point of SAT-based ATPG is the test compaction ability. In this paper, we propose a new methodology which combines the classical SAT-based ATPG formulation with additional fault detection constraints resulting in a pseudoBoolean optimization problem. This leads to an increasing test compaction ability of SAT-based ATPG. Experiments show that the resulting test set generated by pure SAT-based ATPG without any test compaction techniques can significantly be decreased by up to 49%.