Parallel-concurrent fault simulation

A new parallel-concurrent fault simulation algorithm based on the partitioning of faults into groups, with the group size equal to the number of bits in the host computer word, is presented. The fault effects of a particular group are evaluated using parallel fault simulation techniques and propagated using concurrent fault simulation techniques. The speed of the algorithm depends on the circuit and on the fault-grouping criterion. An automatic grouping criterion is devised to group faults that are "close" or nearly equivalent. Comparisons to the concurrent, to the deductive, and to the PROOFS fault simulation techniques are performed on a SPARC SLC with 16 MB of memory running UNIX. ISCAS89 benchmark circuits are used for this comparison.< >