Single-fault fault-collapsing analysis in sequential logic circuits

A study is made of single-fault fault collapsing in sequential logic circuits. Two major phenomena, self-hiding (SH) and delayed reconvergence (DR), which arise from the existence of feedback paths and storage elements in sequential circuits, are analyzed and found to cause the dominance relationship which is valid in combinational circuits but no longer valid in sequential circuits. A fault-collapsing procedure is proposed to collapse faults in sequential circuits. It first collapses faults in the non-SAD (self-hiding and delayed-reconvergence) gates of the combinational part of the sequential circuit and then further collapses faults by identifying the prime fan-out branches. Finally, it collapses faults in feedback lines. The collapsed faults constitute a sufficient representative set of prime faults