Response shaper: a novel technique to enhance unknown tolerance for output response compaction

The presence of unknown values in the simulation result is a key barrier to effective output response compaction in practice. This paper proposes a simple circuit module, called a response shaper, to reshape the scan-out responses before feeding them to a space compactor. Along with the proposed reshaping algorithm, response shapers can help the space compactor to reduce the number of undetectable modeled and un-modeled faults in the presence of unknown values. Moreover, the proposed compaction scheme is ATPGindependent and its hardware requirement is pattern-independent. In our experiments, we use a simple XOR compactor as the space compactor to evaluate the effectiveness of the response shaper. The results show that the number of undetectable faults and unobservable scan-out responses can be significantly reduced in comparison with the results of a convolutional compactor. The number of the extra scan-in bits required for the control signals of the response shapers is only a small ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ICCAD
• Authors: Mango Chia-Tso Chao, Seongmoon Wang, Srimat T. Chakradhar, Kwang-Ting Cheng
• Keywords: Convolutional Compactor, Hardware, ICCAD 2005, Simple Xor Compactor, Space Compactor