A tool for measuring quality of test pattern for LSIs' functional design

A prototype tool is developed for measuring the quality of test patterns for simulation to verify LSI functional designs. The tool is able to count activated conditional branches and evaluate the branch pass index of test patterns. The branch pass index indicates the ratio of the number of conditional branches validated by the pattern to the total number of conditional branches in a design. We developed the prototype tool for PARTHENON. The tool prints out branch identification names not examined by the test pattern. In using the tool for experimental designs, it helped designers to significantly improve pattern quality if a branch pass index of 100% for LSI verification patterns was not achieved. Only about 30 seconds of the processing time was required for a 1000 sentence module. Bugs can often be found in designs with little effort.