Derivation of high quality tests for large heterogeneous circuits: floating-point operations

Abstract

The problem of deriving high quality tests for fast combinational floating-point realizations is investigated. Floating-point circuits are heterogeneous, consisting of a large number of regular and irregular modules. Thus, the test strategy applied combines specialized structure based methods and universal test generation. In order to guarantee sufficient controllability and observability of embedded modules, small hardware modifications are proposed. As a result, the authors obtain optimal-time floating-point circuits for arbitrary operand lengths which can be tested completely with respect to a strong fault model by a minimal number of test patterns.<>