Mutant generation for analog circuit designs

A mutant generation approach for analog circuit designs is proposed, which adopts the methodology from the software testing domain and is capable to generate a batch of mutants automatically. Several mutation operators, which can cover most of the common faults in a practical circuit, are introduced to carry out the mutant generation. The implementation of these operators is based on an undirected graph which serves as an independent intermediate form to facilitate the generation process and to enhance the flexibility of the method. A Spice oriented mutant generation tool is developed and the experimental results prove that the approach and the tool are useful and efficient.