Partial state monitoring for fault detection estimation

Obtaining fault coverage information for functional input sequences is often very difficult. Although many simulation-based techniques have been proposed, they are generally computationally expensive, and if the input sequence changes, new expensive simulations must be run. In this paper, we propose a new type of hardware monitor for the probabilistic determination of how many times a fault was likely to have been covered during functional test or program execution. In addition to providing coverage information for functional test sequences - even those that have never been simulated - these monitors can also be used to determine the relative criticality of faults for the applications a user is running in real time. Thus, in the future, this method has the potential to provide new dynamic optimization capabilities for on-chip field testing.