Making the circular self-test path technique effective for real circuits

The paper assesses the effectiveness of the circular self-test path BIST technique from an experimental point of view and proposes an algorithm to overcome the low fault coverage that often arises when real circuits are examined. Several fault simulation experiments have been performed on the ISCAS89 benchmark set, as well as on a set of industrial circuits: in contrast to the theoretical analysis proposed in [PKKa92], a very high fault coverage is attained with a limited number of clock cycles, but this happens only when the circuit does not enter a loop. This danger cannot be avoided even if clever strategies for flip-flops ordering, aimed at reducing the functional adjacency, are adopted. Instead, we suggest that loops can be avoided and fault coverage increased by carefully choosing the initial state, and we present an approach based on binary decision diagrams and symbolic techniques to solve the problem.