Compression/Scan Co-design for Reducing Test Data Volume, Scan-in Power Dissipation, and Test Application Time

Abstract

LSI testing is critical to guarantee chips are fault-free before they are integrated in a system, so as to increase the reliability of the system. Although full-scan is a widely adopted design-for-testability technique for LSI design and testing, there is a strong need to reduce the test data Volume, scan-in Power dissipation, and test application Time (VPT) of full-scan testing. Based on the analysis of the characteristics of the variable-to-fixed run-length coding technique and the random access scan architecture, this paper presents a novel design scheme to tackle all VPT issues simultaneously. Experimental results on ISCAS'89 benchmarks have shown on average 51.2%, 99.5%, 99.3%, and 85.5% reduction effects in test data volume, average scan-in power dissipation, peak scan-in power dissipation, and test application time, respectively.