Current trends in the development of design automation tools aim at a radical increase
in productivity by offering highly automated design tools. As applications include even
critical control applications, dependability becomes an important design issue.
A novel approach supporting concurrent diagnostic engineering using a dataflow
behavioural description is presented in this paper. The basic idea of this new method
is the extension of the descriptions of the functional elements with the models of fault
effects and fault propagation at each level of the hardware-software codesign hierarchy,
thus allowing design for testability of digital computing systems.
Using the presented approach test generation can be done cuncurrently with the
system design and not only in the back-end design phase as it had been done previously.
For test generation purposes the generalized forms of the well-known logic gate level test
design algorithms call be used