A Novel GA-Based High-Level Synthesis Technique to Enhance RT-Level Concurrent Testing

This paper presents an efficient high-level synthesis (HLS) approach to improve RT-level concurrent testing. The proposed method used for both fault detection and fault location. At first the available resources are used in their dead intervals to test active resources for fault detection, and then some changes are applied to the RT-level controller to locate the faults. The fault detection step is based on a genetic algorithm (GA) search technique. This genetic algorithm is applied to the design after high level synthesis process to explore the test map. The proposed method has been evaluated based on dependability enhancement and area/latency overhead imposed to different benchmarks after applying our algorithm. The dependability has been considered in terms of fault coverage. The experimental result shows that applying our algorithm, the associated area overhead and performance penalty are negligible while the online fault coverage improvement is considerable.