Easily Testable Cellular Carry Lookahead Adders

Abstract

Cellular Carry Lookahead (CLA) adders are systematically implemented in arithmetic units due to their regular, well-balanced structure. In terms of testability and with respect to the classical Cell Fault Model (CFM), cellular CLA adders have poor testability by construction. Design-for-testability (DFT) modifications for cellular CLA adders have been proposed in the literature providing complete CFM testability making the adders either level-testable or C-testable. These designs impose significant area and performance overheads. In this paper, we propose DFT modifications for cellular CLA adders to achieve complete CFM testability with special emphasis on the minimum impact in terms of area and performance. Complete CFM testability is achieved without adding any extra inputs to the adder, with very small area and performance overheads, thus providing a practical solution. The proposed DFT scheme requires only 1 extra output and it is not necessary to put the circuit in a special test mode, while the earlier schemes require the addition of 2 extra inputs to set the circuit in test mode. A rigorous proof of the linear-testability of the adder is given and a sufficient linear-sized test set is provided that guarantees 100% CFM fault coverage. Surprisingly, the size of the proposed linear-sized test set is, in most practical cases, comparable or even smaller than a logarithmic-sized test set proposed in the literature.