Diagnosis of bridging faults in sequential circuits using adaptive simulation, state storage, and path-tracing

A diagnosis technique that integrates the storage of precomputed information with some dynamic computation for the diagnosis of bridging faults in synchronous sequential circuits with no-scan or partial-scan is presented. The method addresses the accuracy, storage requirements, and computational complexity required for diagnosis. A combination of adaptively simulating the behavior of a bridging fault and storing faulty state information at select vectors ensures accuracy with low storage requirements. The combination of adaptive simulation, state storage, and pathtracing has low computational requirements. Experimental results are provided for the ISCAS89 benchmark circuits.