ON THE ROLE OF HARDWARE RESET IN SYNCHRONOUS SEQUENTIAL-CIRCUIT TEST-GENERATION

The existence of hardware reset facilitates the test generation proces s for synchronous sequential circuits, as compared to test generation that starts from an unspecified initial state. Conventionally, therefo re, when hardware reset is available, it is used to reset all state va riables to predetermined values, conventionally 0, before a test seque nce is applied. In this work, we show that full hardware reset (i.e., reset that sets all state variables to 0) may sometimes result in test lengths and numbers of undetectable faults which are higher than the corresponding results when partial reset is used, i.e., when only a su bset of the state variables are resettable, while the others retain th eir previous values (unspecified when the circuit is first operated) w hen reset is applied. The main advantage of partial reset over full re set is that while full reset is only useful once, at the beginning of a test sequence, partial reset can be used while the test sequence is being applied, to transfer the machine from one state to another. Expe rimental results are provided to support the use of partial reset, a p rocedure for selecting the state variables for partial reset is develo ped, and a test generation procedure valid under partial reset is pres ented.