HYBRID SOLVER FOR INTEGRATED CIRCUIT DIAGNOSTICS AND TESTING

One embodiment provides a method and a system for computing diagnoses for a physical system. During operation, the system can obtain a design of the physical system, generate a design of a diagnostic system by augmenting the design of the physical system based on a number of fault-emulating subsystems, and convert the design of the diagnostic system into a polynomial formula comprising a plurality of variables. The plurality of variables can include inputs and outputs of the original physical system and a number of ancillary variables. The system can further embed the polynomial formula on a hardware-based solver configured to perform optimization using the polynomial formula as an objective function to obtain a diagnostic vector used for explaining faults in the physical system.