A High-Level Fault Modeling Technique Using CONES

One way to reduce the lengthy CPU time in fault simulation of a VLSI circuit is to model its functional primitives using high-level description languages such as C. It is commonly observed that, using this approach, a significant amount of time is saved but the resolution of fault coverage may suffer because usually only terminal faults are simulated. In this paper, we present a technique to automatically derive and inject meaningful internal faults of C-modeled primitives using a high-level synthesis tool called CONES. The realistic internal faults are derived from an optimized 2-level implementation of the functional primitives synthesized by CONES. The powerful concept of a parameterized C-model is developed to introduce fault effects for fault simulation. This technique has been verified using AT&T's in-house CAD tools. Our experiments show fairly promising and interesting results.