Robust Coupling Delay Test Sets

One of the most challenging problems in high-level testing is to reduce the size of a high-level test set while ensuring an adequate fault coverage for various implementations of a function under test. A small and high-coverage test set called a robust coupling delay test set (RCDTS) is derived from the coupling delay test set proposed previously. A partial ordering relationship among delay tests in certain implementations called “restricted” gate networks is used to reduce the size of test sets. The RCDTS still detects all robust path delay faults. This result is extended further to the more general balanced inversion parity networks. A test generation program RTGEN for RCDTSs is then developed, and experiments with it show that significant test set reduction can be achieved.