Single fault equivalence classes and minimal test sets in combinational networks

Abstract This paper deals with two important related problems in the area of detection of single faults in combinational logic networks. The first is to determine the different equivalence classes of all possible single faults in the given network and this has been achieved by introducing the concept of a new typo of fault graph. Algorithms have been developed to construct the fault graph of a given combinational network from the fault graphs of the component gates and to enumerate the equivalence classes of faults from the fault graph of the network. The second problem, dealt with in this paper, is to enumerate the minimal complete test set to detect single faults in the network and this has been carried out by utilizing the concept of boolean difference in a new manner, so that the computational complexity has been greatly reduced compared to the existing procedures of fault detection by boolean difference