Enhancing Test Compression With Dependency Analysis for Multiple Expansion Ratios

Abstract

Scan test data compression is widely used in industry to reduce test data volume (TDV) and test application time (TAT). This paper shows how multiple scan chain expansion ratios can help to obtain high test data compression in system-on-chips. Scan chains are partitioned with a higher expansion ratio than normal in scan compression mode and then are gradually concatenated based on a cost function to detect any faults that could not be detected at the higher expansion ratios. It improves the overall test compression ratio since it potentially allows faults to be detected at the highest expansion ratio. This paper introduces a new cost function to choose scan chain concatenation candidates for concatenation for multiple expansion ratios. To avoid TDV and TAT increase by scan concatenation, the proposed method takes a logic structure and scan chain length into consideration. Experiment results show the proposed method reduces TAT and TDV by 53%–64% compared with a traditional scan compression method.