Fault simulation in a multilevel environment: the MOZART approach

MOZART is a concurrent fault simulator for large circuits described at the RT, functional, gate, and switch levels. Performance is gained by means of techniques aimed at the reduction of unnecessary activity. Two such techniques are levelized two-pass simulation, which minimizes the number of events and evaluations, and list event scheduling, which allows optimized processing of simultaneous (fraternal) events for concurrent machines. Both analytical and experimental evidence is provided for the effectiveness of the solutions adopted in MOZART. A performance metric is introduced for fault simulation that is based on comparison with the serial algorithm and is more accurate than those used up till now. Possible tradeoffs between the speeds of fault-free and fault simulations are discussed.<>