Selective Low-Care Coding: A Means for Test Data Compression in Circuits with Multiple Scan Chains

Abstract

This paper presents a test input data compression technique, Selective Low-Care Coding (SLC), which can be used to significantly reduce input test data volume as well as the external test channel requirement for multiscan-based designs. In the proposed SLC scheme, we explored the linear dependencies of the internal scan chains, and instead of encoding all the specified bits in test cubes, only a smaller amount of specified bits are selected for encoding, thus greater compression can be expected. Experiments on the larger benchmark circuits show drastic reduction in test data volume with corresponding savings on test application time can be indeed achieved even for the well-compacted test set.