A new approach to built-in self-testable datapath synthesis basedon integer linear programming

摘要

The focus of high-level built-in self-test (BIST) synthesis isnregister assignment, which involves system register assignment, BISTnregister assignment, and interconnection assignment. To reduce thencomplexity involved in the assignment process, existing high-level BISTnsynthesis methods decouple the three tasks and perform the tasksnsequentially at the cost of global optimality. They also try to achievenonly one objective: minimizing either area overhead or test time. Hence,nthose methods do not render exploration of large design space, which maynresult in a local optimum. In this paper, we propose a new approach tonthe BIST data path synthesis based on integer linear programming thatnperforms the three register assignment tasks concurrently to yieldnoptimal designs. In addition, our approach finds an optimal registernassignment for each k-test session. Therefore, it offers a range ofndesigns with different figures of merit in area and test time. Ournexperimental results show that our method successfully synthesizes anBIST circuit for every k-test session for all six circuits experimented.nAll the BIST circuits are better in area overhead than those generatednby existing high-level BIST synthesis methods