The Test Engineer's Assistant: a support environment for hardware design for testability

Abstract

A description is given of TEA (Test Engineer's Assistant), a CAD (computer-aided design) environment developed to provide the knowledge base and tools needed by a system designer for incorporating testability features into a design. TEA helps the designer meet the requirements of fault coverage and ambiguity group size. Fault coverage is defined as the percentage of faults that can be detected out of the population of all faults of a unit under test with a particular test set. An ambiguity group is defined as the smallest hardware entity in a given level of the system design hierarchy (that is, board, subsystem, and system) to which a fault can be isolated. The fault model considered throughout is the single stuck-at fault model. An example application of TEA is included.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>