Making cause-effect cost effective: low-resolution fault dictionaries

The foremost problem in VLSI fault diagnosis is the problem of data: there's simply too much of it. Circuits are large and contain enormous numbers of faults of many types. Full-response fault dictionaries are too large for practical or quick diagnosis, but pass-fail dictionaries often do not provide adequate resolution. The goal of this paper is to examine different sets of diagnostic data, determine the utility of each, and investigate ways of drastically reducing the data requirements for fault diagnosis. In doing so we introduce a new fault signature type, and begin to develop the idea of low-precision fault diagnosis in which useful diagnoses are obtained with a minimum of data and computation.