Technical Report No. 81, June 1996 - Abstract

Harry Hengster, Uwe Sparmann, Bernd Becker, Sudhakar M. Roddy:
Local Transformation and Robust Dependent Path Delay Faults

Local transformations are used in several synthesis approaches. During application of such transformations attention has to be paid to many important properties, e.g. area, speed, power consumption, and testability. In this paper we study relations between local transformations and delay fault testability. In delay testing it is not necessary to test every path in a circuit to ascertain correct timing behavior. For example, a set of robust dependent path delay faults need not be considered for testing if all paths that are not robust dependent are tested. We present sufficient conditions for local transformations which ensure that a test set for all non-robust-dependent paths in the original circuit is also a test set for all non-robust-dependent paths in the transformed circuit. These conditions are applied to some local transformations which are often used in logic synthesis and it is shown that they preserve testability. The impact of local transformations on robust dependent testability is demonstrated by experimental results performed on benchmark circuits.