COGENT: COmpressing and compacting GEnetic algorithms and Neural networks based automatic Test generator

Genetic algorithms are one of the most powerful tools used in the field of testing to deliver high-quality automatic test pattern generation (ATPG) for both sequential and combinational circuits essentially because ATPG is a search and optimization problem. Artificial neural networks, using the learning methodology can be used to solve any class of linearly non-separable problems, which includes classification and recognition. In this paper, these two tools have been combined to deliver a high performance ATPG, COGENT. COGENT also compacts and compresses/decompresses data. The compression algorithm used is a variation of the Coulomb´s scheme. The results for all the different cases examined have been tabulated and discussed.