Circuit Testing Using Self-Nonself Discrimination

Built-in self-test (BIST) techniques are rapidly becoming an industry-wide standard test technique in the design of testing support hardware for VLSI circuits. In the BIST setup both test pattern generation and output response analysis are performed on-chip hardware. In this manuscript a BIST scheme based on immune system is presented. The main conceptual ingredient utilized in order to build the proposed scheme is the application of the negative-selection mechanism of the immune system, which is able to discriminate between the self (body's own cell) and any foreign cell (non-self). Experimental results concerning fault detection in some ISCAS85 benchmarks circuits are presented