Why RTL ATPG？.pdfVIP

维普资讯 V01．17No．2 J．Comput．Sci． Techno1． Mar．2002 W hy RTL ATPG? MINYinghua(闵应骅) Ins~itutsofComputingTechnolagy．TheChineseAcademy ＆tence Beijing100080,P．R．China E．m aih rain@ict．accn Received September 10．2001． Abstract Registern 枷 ferLevel(RTL)Aut．omaticTestPatternGeneration (ATPG) hasbeenofwideconcern fortwodecades M eamwhilegateqevelATPG hasmaderemarkable progressin deafingwith l~rgecircuits Anarguraentisthenposed．DoweneedRTL ATPG in the caseofgate-levelATPG capableofgenerating testsfor large circuits? Thispaper attemptstoanswerthisquestion Thenecessity,difficulty,andm~jorinterestsofRTLATPG arereviewed Keywords automatictestgeneration(ATPG)registertrv~sferlevel(RrL) 1 Introduction W eBLrepleasedtoseetheprogressingate．1evelATPG ．whichcanhandlelargecombinationalcircults withhundredsofthousandsgates．TheeffeCtivenesscartbe100％．which mean~thatthe rPG is capable ofgenerating a testfor any detectable stuck-at fault，and identifying theredundna cy for anvundetectablefault．On theotherhna d，itsefficiencv canbeveryhigh，whichmeanstheATPG takesveryreasonablecomputation timeforlargecircuits Even thoughfurtheradvanceforsequential circaitsisstill expected Inthiscase．itisnaturaltoaskwhetherwestillneedRTL ATPG ． RTL ATPG has longcaughtour attention．which generatestestsbasedon theregistertransfer leveldescription ofacircuitundertest[1 assumethatRTL designsarewritten in eithervery highspeedintegratedcircuithardwaredescriptionlanguage(VHDL)orVerflog RTLdescriptionsare clas sified intothreecategories： 11BehavioralRTL description．whichuses aprorgam todescribethebehavioroftheci