Maintaining Scalability of Test Generation Using Multicore Shared Memory Systems

Taking advantage of multicore architectures can provide significant improvement for many design automation problems. However, the parallelization procedure introduces challenges, such as workload duplication, limited search space exploration, and race contention among different threads. In this article, we propose a parallel framework for automatic test pattern generation using shared memory multicore systems that support test generation (TG) for both single-detect and multiple-detect fault models. The framework follows a two-epoch approach, each focusing on a different category of faults, during which a test seed generation is followed by compatibility merging. Various optimization techniques are incorporated in each epoch, designed to achieve higher speedup for the overall TG procedure without impacting much the test set size. A cluster-based approach is also presented, extending the proposed framework to consider multiple-detect fault models without affecting its efficiency. The obtained experimental results demonstrate increased speedup rates compared with the state-of-the-art multicore-based tools while, at the same time, the test inflation problem is restrained. For the multiple-detect extension, these properties are maintained despite the increased workload and the additional constraint of retaining the number of detections for each fault while merging.