Volume 10, Number 15, November 2020

Incremental Automatic Correction for Digital VLSI Circuits

  Authors

Lamya Gaber¹, Aziza I. Hussein² and Mohammed Moness¹, ¹Minia University, Egypt, ²Effat University, KSA

  Abstract

The impact of the recent exponential increase in complexity of digital VLSI circuits has heavily affected verification methodologies. Many advances toward verification and debugging techniques of digital VLSI circuits have relied on Computer Aided Design (CAD). Existing techniques are highly dependent on specialized test patterns with specific numbers increased by the rising complexity of VLSI circuits. A second problem arises in the form of large sizes of injecting circuits for correction and large number of SAT solver calls with a negative impact on the resultant running time. Three goals arise: first, diminishing dependence on a given test pattern by incrementally generating compact test patterns corresponding to design errors during the rectification process. Second, to reduce the size of in-circuit mutation circuit for error-fixing process. Finally, distribution of test patterns can be performed in parallel with a positive impact on digital VLSI circuits with large numbers of inputs and outputs. The experimental results illustrate that the proposed incremental correction algorithm can fix design bugs of type gate replacements in several digital VLSI circuits from ISCAS'85 with high speed and full accuracy. The speed of proposed Auto-correction mechanism outperforms the latest existing methods around 4.8x using ISCAS'85 benchmarks. The parallel distribution of test patterns on digital VLSI circuits during generating new compact test patterns achieves speed around 1.2x compared to latest methods.

  Keywords

Auto-correction, ATPG, Fault detection, Verification.