METHOD FOR TESTABILITY ANALYSIS AND TEST POINT INSERTION AT THE RT-LEVEL OF A HARDWARE DEVELOPMENT LANGUAGE (HDL) SPECIFICATION

A method is provided for producing a synthesizable RT-Level specification, having a testability enhancement from a starting RT-Level specification representative of a circuit to be designed, for input to a synthesis tool to generate a gate-level circuit. The method includes the steps of performing a testability analysis on a Directed Acyclic Graph by computing and propagating Testability Measures forward and backward through VHDL statements, identifying the bits of each signal and/or variable, and adding test point statements into the specification at the RT-Level to improve testability of the circuit to be designed. The computation of Controllability and Observability method is purely functional, and does not subsume the knowledge of a gate-level implementation of the circuit being analyzed.