SYNTHESIS AND TESTING OF THRESHOLD LOGIC CIRCUITS

Threshold logic gates gaining more importance in recent years due to the significant development in the switching devices. This renewed the interest in synthesis and testing of circuits with threshold logic gates. Two important synthesis considerations of threshold logic circuits are addressed namely, threshold logic function identification and reducing the total number of threshold logic gates required to represent the given boolean circuit description. A fast method to identify the given Boolean function as a threshold logic function with weight assignment is introduced. It characterizes the threshold logic function based on the modified chows parameters which results in drastic reduction in time and complexity. Experiment results shown that the proposed method is at least 10 times faster for each input and around 20 times faster for 7 and 8 input, when comparing with the algorithmic based methods. Similarly, it is 100 times faster for 8 input, when comparing with asummable method. Existing threshold logic synthesis methods decompose the larger input functions into smaller input functions and perform synthesis for them. This results in increase in the number of threshold logic gates required to represent the given circuit description. The proposed implicit synthesis methods increase the size of the functions that can be handled by the synthesis algorithm, thus the number of threshold logic gates required to implement very large input function decreases. Experiment results shown that the reduction in the TLG count is 24% in the best case and 18% on average. An automatic test pattern generation approach for transition faults on a circuit consisting of current mode threshold logic gates is introduced. The generated pattern for each fault excites the maximum propagation delay at the gate (the fault site). This is a high quality ATPG. Since current mode threshold logic gate circuits are pipelined and the combinational depth at each pipeline stage is practically one. It is experimentally shown that the fault coverage for all benchmark circuits is approximately 97%. It is also shown that the proposed method is time efficient