Improved Fault Diagnosis for Reversible Circuits

Reversible circuits rely on an entirely different computing paradigm allowing to perform computations not only from the primary inputs to the primary outputs but also vice versa. Recently, first physical realizations based on this paradigm have been introduced in the domain of quantum computation and low-power circuits. This puts key test challenges for the future on the table. While first steps towards testing such circuits have been made (e.g. fault models and appropriate ATPG methods have been introduced), fault diagnosis has hardly been considered so far. In this paper, we consider the application of fault diagnosis methods for reversible circuits. In particular, we propose a new fault diagnosis approach which explicitly exploits the advantageous properties of reversible circuits. Experiments show that even though conventional methods can be applied to reversible circuits, improvements of more than one order of magnitude are achieved if reversibility is explicitly exploited.