Exploiting behavioral information in gate-level ATPG

This paper aims at broadening the scope of hierarchical ATPG to the behavio ral-level. The main problem is identified, namely the mismatch of timing mo dels between the behavioral- and gate-levels. As a main contribution of thi s paper, a theoretical analysis of this problem led to the definition of a novel concept, that of dominated patterns, that captures the needed link be tween the levels. Some metrics are defined, taken from the software realm, that allow generation of test patterns at the behavioral-level. To validate the concept correctness, different ATPG systems are presented, and experim ental results show an improvement in the test quality, thanks to the exploi tation of behavioral-level information.