USING GENETIC ALGORITHMS TO DESIGN EFFICIENT BUILT-IN TEST PATTERN GENERATORS

摘要

A method of finding a structure of the Cellular Automata (CA) based on Genetic Algorithms (GA) is presented in the paper. The mentioned CA, henceforth denoted as DTI-LFSR (Intrainverted Linear Feedback Shift Register with D and T flip-flops), is composed of D and T flip-flops with either active-high or active-low inputs. The DTI-LFSR structure found by the GA should generate vector sequence containing at least some deterministic test patterns, which covers all or the majority of stuck-at faults in a given Circuit Under Test (CUT). Remaining faults, if any, are covered by the pseudo-random patterns produced by the same DTI-LFSR. The advantages that make the DTI-LFSR the efficient Test Pattern Generator (TPG) are short testing time, low area-overhead and high operating frequency.