Structural analysis of large digital circuits

Structural analysis of large circuits is very important for circuit design and test. The paper gives a generic structural model of large circuits and proposes a new concept of separated-cone. An algorithm is given to partition a circuit into separated-cones, and to find all the maximal-supergates in each separated-cone. After partitioning, the circuit fits for the generic structural model. This kind of partition is significant for design for testability, test generation, and fault simulation. It is interesting to explore the principle of hard-faults concentration, which means faults that are hard to detect are concentrated on a few separated-cones. Finally, the partitioning results of the 10 IS-CAS benchmark circuits are given.<
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