Saturn: An Automatic Test Generation System for Digital Circuits

This paper describes a novel test generation system, called Saturn, for testing digital circuits. The system differs from existing test generation systems in that it allows a designer to specify the structure and behavior of a design at a collection of abstraction levels that mirror the design refinement process. The system exploits the abstract design formulations to increase the efficiency of test generation by ignoring irrelevant detail whenever possible, These capabilities are made possible by using general representation and reasoning methods based on logic, which provide a declarative representation of a design, and permit using a single inference procedure for reasoning both forwards and backwards through the design for test generation.