Sharif Digital Repository

This paper proposes a high-level test generation method which considers the control part as well as data path of a register transfer level circuit as a set of polynomial functions to generate behavioral test patterns from faulty behavior instead of comparing the faulty and fault-free circuits based on a hybrid Boolean-word canonical representation called Horner expansion diagram. Since this set of polynomial functions express primary outputs and next states with respect to primary inputs and present states, it is not necessary to perform justification/propagation phase which leads to a minimum number of backtracks. It improves fault coverage and reduces test generation time over logic-level... 

Pipelined on-chip interconnects are used in on-chip networks to increase the throughput of interconnects and to achieve freedom in choosing arbitrary network topologies. Since reliability and energy consumption are prominent issues in on-chip networks, they should be carefully considered in the design of pipelined interconnects. In this paper, ws propose the use of energy recovery techniques to construct low energy and reliable pipelined on-chip interconnects. The proposed designs have been evaluated using detailed SPICE simulations. In the reliability analysis, the SEU fault model is considered as it is a major reliability concern in the sequential circuits (pipelining memory elements)... 

Improving testability during the early stages of high-level synthesis has several benefits including reduced test hardware overheads, reduced test costs, reduced design iterations, and significant improved fault coverage. In this paper, we present a novel register allocation method, which is based on weighted graph coloring algorithm, targeting testability improvement for digital circuits. In our register allocation method, several high-level testability parameters including sequential depth, sequential loop, and controllability/observability are considered. Our experiments show using this register allocation method results in significant improvement in automatic test pattern generation time... 

Reliability analysis of combinational logic circuits using error probabilities methods, such as PTM, has been widely developed and used in literature. However, using these methods for reliability analysis of sequential logic circuits will lead to inaccurate results, because of existence of loops in their architecture. In this paper a new method is proposed based on converting the sequential circuit to a secondary combinational circuit and applying an iterative reliability analysis to the resulting configuration. Experimental results demonstrate good accuracy levels for this method  

In this paper, we propose a very fast analytical approach to measure the overall circuit Soft Error Rate (SER) and to identify the most vulnerable gates and flip-flops. In the proposed approach, we first compute the error propagation probability from an error site to primary outputs as well as system bistables. Then, we perform a multi-cycle error propagation analysis in the sequential circuit. The results show that the proposed approach is four to five orders of magnitude faster than the Monte Carlo (MC) simulation-based fault injection approach with 92% accuracy. This makes the proposed approach applicable to industrial-scale circuits  

This paper presents a novel automatic debugging algorithm for a postsynthesis combinational arithmetic circuit. The approach is robust under wide varieties of arithmetic circuit architectures and design optimizations. The debugging algorithm in this paper consists of three phases of partial product initialization, XOR extraction, and carry-signalmapping. The run-time complexity of conventional carry-signal-mapping algorithms, such as the approach described by Stoffel and Kunz, is exponential. However, in the proposed algorithm, by making use of some important design issues, we categorize the extracted XORs into half/full-adders to make a very fast debugging algorithm. This approach is robust... 

This paper presents a novel automatic debugging algorithm for a postsynthesis combinational arithmetic circuit. The approach is robust under wide varieties of arithmetic circuit architectures and design optimizations. The debugging algorithm in this paper consists of three phases of partial product initialization, xor extraction, and carry-signal mapping. The run-time complexity of conventional carry-signal-mapping algorithms, such as the approach described by Stoffel and Kunz, is exponential. However, in the proposed algorithm, by making use of some important design issues, we categorize the extracted xors into half/full-adders to make a very fast debugging algorithm. This approach is... 

By increasing the complexity of system on a chip (SoC) formal equivalence checking has become more and more important and a major economical issue to detect design faults at early stages of the design cycle in order to reduce time-to-market as much as possible. However, lower level methods such as BDDs and SAT solvers suffer from memory and computational explosion problems to match sizes of industrial designs in formal equivalence verification. In this paper, we describe a hybrid bit- and word-level canonical representation called Linear Taylor Expansion Diagram (LTED) [1] which can be used to check the equivalence between two descriptions in different levels of abstractions. To prove the...