A novel random approach to diagnostic test generation

The importance of diagnostic test generation cannot be overemphasized as it is increasingly becoming important for diagnosing the complex circuits designed today. One approach is to use a test set that is generated originally for testing as the starting point so the diagnostic generator uses a deterministic approach to find diagnostic vectors that are then added to the original test set. But the challenge with the deterministic approach is with its high computational cost and time. We propose a novel semi-random diagnostic generator which is inspired from the simplicity and speed a random ATPG for test generation has. Two methods are presented and our investigation shows that this semi-random approach improves the diagnostic resolution and has a lesser computational cost and time.