Synthesizing designs with low-cardinality minimum feedback vertex set for partial scan application
S. Dey, Miodrag Potkonjak, Ranjan Roy · 2002
An efficient partial scan approach for cost-effective sequential ATPG is to select flip-flops (FFs) in the minimum feedback vertex set (MFVS) of the FF dependency graph, so that loops are broken. Through a comprehensive analysis of the sources of loops in the data path, this paper proposes a new high-level synthesis methodology to synthesize data paths which have low-cardinality MFVS, thereby reducing the cost of partial scan significantly. A test efficiency of 100% could be achieved for all designs synthesized by the proposed approach, requiring a significantly less number of FFs to be scanned compared to the original implementations.>