Dynamic Redundancy Identification in Automatic Test Generation

The performance of an Automatic Test Generator can be significantly improved by identifying redundancy via techniques that do not involve search relying on exhaustive implicit enumeration. This paper presents a new dynamic technique to identify redundant faults. This technique works during test generation but is not based on a search process. It exploits dominance and test-covering relations among faults, which allow identification of additional redundant faults after the test generator fails to generate a test for a target fault. This technique has been implemented in AT&T's LTG (Lamp2 Test Generation) system and has shown up to 32% reduction in number of backtracks for a large circuit with approximately 20,000 gates.