Generation of compact stuck-at test sets targeting unmodeled defects

This letter presents a new method to generate compact stuck-at test sets that offer high defect coverage. The proposed method first selects the most effective patterns from a large $N$-detect repository, by using a new output deviation-based metric. Then it embeds complete coverage of stuck-at faults within these patterns, and uses the proposed metric to further improve their defect coverage. Results show that the proposed method outperforms a recently proposed competing approach in terms of unmodeled defect coverage. In many cases, higher defect coverage is obtained even than much larger $N$-detect test sets for several values of $N$. Finally, results provide the insight that, instead of using $N$- detect testing with as large $N$ as possible, it is more efficient to combine the output deviations metric with multi-detect testing to get high-quality, compact test sets. © 2006 IEEE.