Identifying Reliability-Critical Primary Inputs of Combinational Circuits Based on the Model of Gate-Sensitive Attributes

The identification of reliability-critical primary input leads (RCPIs) plays an important role in the testing and prediction of reliability boundaries of logic circuits. This article presents a gate-sensitive-attributes-based approach to estimate the criticality of the primary input leads in combinational circuits to their reliability. Oriented to the input vector, a subcircuit-based traversal method marks the critical input leads of each gate in a circuit. Gate-sensitive attributes and a reverse recursive algorithm quantify the effect of each RCPI on circuit reliability under the input vector. A parallel calculation method based on subcircuits with only one primary output reduces the computational complexity to accelerate the calculation process. Similarity-based clustering avoids unnecessary calculations, and a self-adaptive strategy is used to check convergence. Experimental results on benchmark circuits show that the average accuracy of this approach is 0.9634 with Monte Carlo (MC) as the reference and it is 3445 times faster than the MC on average while its average memory cost is 1.67 greater than the MC model. Although the fitness of the worst input vector obtained by other reference methods is 1.09 times better than that of this approach on average, this approach is approximately 21 times faster than that reference method on average.