A circular pipeline processing based deterministic parallel test pattern generator

Parallel programming is an attractive solution to accelerate test pattern generation (TPG); however, the associated non-determinism often leads to non-reproducible test pattern sets. In this paper, the circular pipeline processing (CPP) principle is proposed to facilitate deterministic parallel TPG. CPP preserves the task processing orders that are necessary to ensure TPG determinism with low inter-thread synchronization overhead. Based on CPP, a deterministic parallel test pattern generator is developed; it guarantees to produce the same test pattern set regardless of the thread timing and the thread count. Experimental results on benchmark circuits show that the proposed test pattern generator exhibits close-to-linear speedup for at least up to 12 threads.