A parallel algorithm for fault simulation based on PROOFS

Abstract

Fault simulation for sequential circuits numbers among the highly compute intensive tasks in the integrated circuit design process. In the quest for rapid design turn around, parallelization has been proposed to speed fault simulation. We introduce ProperPROOFS, a parallel extension of the PROOFS fault simulation package. ProperPROOFS exploits parallelism based on fault partitioning, incorporating static and dynamic partitioning schemes and a new asynchronous and distributed method of fault redistribution. We present results for circuits in the ISCAS-89 benchmark set across several parallel architectures. A detailed evaluation of results provides new insight into the use of fault partitioning to parallelize high performance serial fault simulation applications.