On the impact of fault list partitioning in parallel implementations for dynamic test compaction considering multicore systems

Modern multicore systems have multiplied the processing power of computing systems, increasing the potential of solving difficult EDA problems. At the same time, careful decomposition of the problem should be made in order to explore the parallelism without compromising the quality of the result with respect to the existing non-parallel solutions. Test set compaction is one of the major EDA problems that is NP-hard and a crucial component of any ATPG methodology. This paper presents a study on the effect of fault list partitioning on a dynamic test set compaction algorithm that has shown to give very good results when considering the entire fault list. The serial algorithm is executed in different subsets of the considered fault list and the obtained results are evaluated in terms of the compaction achieved as well as the execution time. The experimental results demonstrate that the partitioning technique used highly affects the compaction quality while the execution time is significantly reduced.