Subset Of Flip-flops Research Articles

Activity-Driven Fine-Grained Clock Gating and Run Time Power Gating Integration

As the two most widely used techniques to reduce dynamic power and leakage power, clock gating (CG) and power gating (PG), respectively, are expected to be integrated together effectively. Normally, the implementation of CG leads to some redundant operations, which provides the opportunity to apply PG. In this brief, we have proposed an activity-driven fine-grained CG and PG integration. First, we introduce an optimized bus-specific-clock-gating (OBSC) scheme to improve traditional XOR-based CG. It chooses only a subset of flip-flops (FFs) to be gated selectively, and the problem of gated FF selection is reduced from exponential complexity into linear. Then those combinational logics, which completely depend on the outputs of gated FFs, are performing redundant operations. They can be power gated, and the clock enable signal generated by OBSC is used as the sleep signal. A minimum average idle time concept is proposed to determine whether the insertion of PG will lead to energy reduction. In order to evaluate our technique, we experimented on twenty ISCAS'89 circuits. The simulation results show that 25.07% dynamic power can be reduced by OBSC, and 50.19% active leakage power can be saved by PG.

Partial Reset Methodology and Experiments for Improving Random-Pattern Testability and BIST of Sequential Circuits

Partial reset has been shown to have significant impact on test generation for sequential circuits in a stored-pattern test application environment. In this paper, we explore the use of partial reset in fault-independent testing and built-in self-test (BIST) of non-scan sequential circuits. We select a subset of flip-flops in the circuit to be resetable to logic one or zero during the application of the test vectors. The resetting is performed with random frequency. The selection of the flip-flops and the reset polarity is based on fault-propagation analysis, which determines the impact of a selected flip-flop on fault propagation from the circuits structure. Application of partial reset as described above yields an average improvement of 15% in fault-coverage for sequential circuits resistant to random pattern testing. To further enhance testability, we also present a methodology for selecting observable test points based on propagation of switching activity. Overall, high fault coverages (about 97%) are obtained for many of the ISCAS89 benchmark circuits. Thus, partial reset BIST provides a low cost alternative for testing sequential circuits when scan design is unacceptable due to area and/or delay constraints. The routing overhead for implementing BIST is seen to be about 6%.