Genetic Selecting Test Patterns that Cover States of Sequential Circuits at RT-Level

The merit and shortcoming of traditional states covering method and genetic method are analyzed in this article.A new genetic selecting approach is presented to overcome the shortcoming of these two methods.First,it can be implemented at RT-level.Second,it uses state coverage as fitness function,which is useful to test the control-part of the circuit.Third,it can test the control part and data part of circuit at the same time.The concept about dynamic state transfer and static state transfer are also brought up in this paper to direct test pattern generation.Based on this approach,an ATPG tool named GRTT is developed.Experimental results on ITC99-benchmarks show that GRTT can get excellent results not only in coverage but also in run-time.In comparison with X-Pulling,an experimental RT-level ATPG system,GRTT runs faster.