Functional Delay Test Quality Assessment at High Level of Abstraction

The test can be developed at the functional level of the circuit. Such an approach allows developing the test at the early stages of the design process in parallel with other activities of this process. The main problem is the quality assessment of the functional test because the implementation of the circuit is not available yet. The paper presents the criteria of the quality assessment of the functional test consisting of the pairs of patterns with multiple signal transition. The introduced criteria are based solely on the primary input values and the primary output values of the programming prototype. The use of the indirect impact of the inputs to the outputs in the criteria of the quality assessment is introduced for the first time. The presented experimental results explore the relationship between the value of the presented criterion and the transition fault coverage at the gate level. The increased quality of the functional test means the higher transition fault coverage.