Equivalence classes of circuit mutants for experimental design

Experimental Design, as defined in science and manufacturing, relies on data sets that belong to well-defined equivalence classes. This paper introduces a method to generate tightly controlled equivalence classes of circuit mutants, given the graph-based characterization of a reference netlist, which an general may contain cycles. A set of experiments that measure the performance for a number of core algorithms in CAD demonstrates merits of the method.