Fault simulation acceleration for TRAX dictionary construction using GPUs

To ensure robustness of integrated systems, the TRAnsition-X (TRAX) fault model has been used with on-chip test and diagnosis hardware, utilizing fault dictionaries for diagnosis. Generating a fault dictionary requires fault simulation with no fault dropping, requiring extensive computational resources. This paper presents the design and implementation of an efficient fault simulator for the TRAX fault model, designed to run on a graphics processing unit (GPU). The inherent parallelism of the fault simulation problem maps well to the large number of concurrent threads supported by a modern GPU, and a GPU can be used to accelerate the construction of a fault dictionary. Our approach employs both pattern-parallel and fault-parallel algorithms in the GPU kernel implementations. Experiments involving various circuits, including the OpenSPARC T2 processor, demonstrate a mean speed-up of nearly 8x.