Electronic Design Automation

14.3. Fault Simulation

Fault simulation is a more challenging task than logic simulation because of the added dimension of complexity (i.e., the behavior of the circuit containing all the modeled faults must be simulated). When simulating one fault at a time, the amount of computation is approximately proportional to the circuit size, the number of test patterns, and the number of modeled faults. Because the number of modeled faults are roughly proportional to the circuit size, the overall time complexity of fault simulation is O(pn²), for p test patterns and n logic gates, which becomes infeasible for large circuits. To improve fault simulation performance, various fault simulation techniques have been developed. In this section, we restrict ...