PROPERTEST - A PORTABLE PARALLEL TEST GENERATOR FOR SEQUENTIAL-CIRCUITS

Parallel algorithms developed for CAD problems today suffer from two i mportant drawbacks, First, they are machine specific, and tend to perf orm poorly on architectures other than the one for they were designed, Second, the quality of results degrades significantly during parallel execution. In this paper, we address these two problems for an import ant CAD application: test generation for sequential circuits, We have developed a new parallel test generator, ProperTEST, that is portable across a range of MIMD parallel architectures, This work is part of th e ProperCAD project which aims to develop CAD algorithms that run unch anged on shared and nonshared memory machines, We present performance data for ProperTEST on ISCAS 89 sequential circuits on a Sequent Symme try, an InteI i860 hypercube, an NCUBE/2 hypercube, a network of Sun w orkstations, and an Encore Multimax. Parallel processing can also be u sed to improve on the fault coverage possible on one processor in a gi ven amount of time, This was not possible in earlier approaches due to search anomalies, Using ProperTEST, we provide results on ISCAS 89 be nchmark programs demonstrating the improvements in fault coverage as t he number of processors is increased.