A Distributed ATPG System Combining Test Compaction Based on Pure MaxSAT

As the target of test synthesis is to obtain highly compacted test patterns with acceptable fault coverage, automatic test pattern generation (ATPG) plays an important role in the design for test (DFT) process. Distributed ATPG systems have been designed to harness the parallelism of computer architectures to accelerate this process. However, due to delayed communication among distributed nodes, the redundancy of certain computations and substantial pattern expansion issues may arise. To tackle this problem, this paper proposes a test compaction module based on Pure MaxSAT to re-compact the patterns generated by the distributed ATPG system, significantly reducing the number of patterns without loss of fault coverage. Techniques such as partial fault-dropping, two-stage compaction, and building a fault dictionary with machine word all-fill are integrated to reduce the cost of test compaction and internal communication overhead within the distributed framework. Experimental results indicate that the number of patterns generated by the distributed ATPG system integrated with the test compaction module is greatly reduced within an acceptable time overhead.