Experimental studies on SAT-based test pattern generation for industrial circuits

Abstract

Due to the ever increasing size of integrated circuits classical methods for automatic test pattern generation (ATPG) reach their limits. On the other hand recent advances in algorithms to solve the Boolean satisfiability (SAT) problem allow the application to large instances. This suggests to exploit modern SAT techniques for ATPG. Here, we present a SAT-based ATPG tool that is applicable to large industrial circuits. The performances of different SAT-solvers are experimentally evaluated and the potential for problem specific heuristics is shown. Further experiments show that most of the faults can be classified very efficiently independently of the circuit size