Abstract:

Syndrome testing and parity testing are exhaustive input based fixed fault testing methods. They have been employed for many years. The paper proposes a novel syndrome testing method, named third order  syndrome testing, which combines syndrome testing and parity testing. Its main feature is that both the testing efficiency and the fault coverage are improved so that syndrome testing can be performed on the circuits whose syndrome could not be tested. Based on the traditional syndrome testing, parity testing is introduced to preprocess the circuits, thus improving the testing efficiency. Then, syndrome testing is enhanced to be the second and the third order syndrome testing, thus improving the fault coverage. Experiments on reference circuits and commonly used circuits demonstrate the practicability and effectiveness of the proposal.

Key words: parity test;syndrome test;second order and third order syndrome testing;exhaustive test;fault coverage