Redundant Functional Faults Reduction by Saboteur Synthesis

High-level descriptions of digital systems are perturbed by using high-level fault models in order to perform functional verification. Fault lists should be accurately created in order to avoid waste of time during ATPG and fault simulation. However, automatic fault injection tools can insert redundant faults which are not symptoms of design errors. Such redundant faults should be removed from the fault list before starting the verification session. This paper proposes an automatic strategy for high-level faults injection, which removes redundant bit coverage faults. An efficient implementation of a bit coverage saboteur is proposed, which allows one to use synthesis for redundant faults removal. Experimental results highlight the effectiveness of the methodology. By using the proposed injection strategy, functional APTG time is reduced and fault coverage is increased.