Design for testability II: from high level perspective

Abstract

The advantage of a top-down design flow, specifying design a high abstraction level with less implementation specific details, is that design exploration, where design alternatives easily can be explored, is eased. Besides, there is another important advantage: the task of introducing a design for testability (DFT) method is eased too. This is because the model at high abstraction level includes fewer details and therefore the handling of design and test become easier. DFT is important to reduce the complexity of the test generation for a circuit (Fujiwara, 1985; Abramovici, Breuer, and Friedman, 1990). Various DFT methods have been proposed to augment a given circuit to become more easily testable.