Identification of feedback bridging faults with oscillation

When a feedback bridging fault occurs in a combinational circuit and it is activated, logical oscillation may be generated in the circuit. In this paper, the necessary conditions are presented for feedback bridging faults to generate logical oscillation. Also, a method is proposed to identify such faults in feedback bridging ones. It is based on piecewise-linearized models obtained from input/output characteristics of logic gates and does not require circuit simulation of large size of circuits to identify them. In the experiments for evaluating the method, all of the feedback bridging faults to generate logical oscillation are identified by using the method.