Testing Digital Systems by Product Codes

摘要

An approach to digital system testing is proposed based on combined utilization of compact testing methods and product codes. A digital system is broken to groups of mutually independent circuits under test (CUTs). Test responses from the CUTs of a group are considered as sub-words of a code word of product code. The check part of this code is used to ascertain the faulty CUTs within a group. For a given number of CUTs and multiplicity of their faults the amount of memory to store the check part can be less than the one for compact testing. Appropriate encoding-decoding procedures and devices are considered.