Fault partitioning techniques for efficient digital fault simulation

The first technique, that the idea of which is to identify and simulate only potentially detectable faults out of the total fault list, is called potentially detectable fault simulation (PDFS). By means of dynamic fault partitioning (DFP), which is performed in the zero-delay timing model, the fault partitioning overhead is minimized in PDFS simulation. The second technique, called multiple number of faults per pass (MNFP), intends to partition the total fault set into a number of fault groups which can be simulated as multiple faults. In MNFP simulation, an attempt is made to detect a faulty group first, and then locate the single faults inside the group. Two approaches to fault partitioning are made for this technique of fault simulation: probabilistic fault partitioning (PFP), and modular fault partitioning (MFP). Significant savings in simulation time are expected to be realized from MNFP as well as PDFS simulation.