Techniques for improving the efficiency of sequential circuit test generation

New techniques are presented in this paper to improve the efficiency of a test generation procedure for synchronous sequential circuits. These techniques aid the test generation procedure by reducing the search space, carrying out non-chronological backtracking, and reusing the test generation effort. They have been integrated into an existing sequential test generation system MIX to constitute a new system, named MIX-PLUS. The experimental results for the ISCAS-89 and ADDENDUM-93 benchmark circuits demonstrate the effectiveness of these techniques in improving the fault coverage and test generation efficiency.