A Novel Partition-based Technique to Reduce Power, Time and Data Volume in Scan-based Test

摘要

A novel technique introduced in this paper addresses power, time and data volume in scan-based tests. These are from the most important problems in the scan-based test architectures. In the proposed technique, the scan chain is broken into smaller sub-chains of equal size where only one of them is activated at a time. An internal controller is used to control the operation of different sub-chains. Both control and scan data are provided by the same scan-in pin and no extra pin is required in this architecture. Partially-specified test data is reformatted and converted to fully-specified data which can take the best advantage of this new architecture. The experimental results show effectiveness of the proposed technique in reducing power, time and data volume in scan-based test architectures.