RL-huffman encoding for test compression and power reduction in scan applications
Mehrdad Nourani, M.H. Tehranipour · ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems · 2005
This article mixes two encoding techniques to reduce test data volume, test pattern delivery time, and power dissipation in scan test applications. This is achieved by using run-length encoding followed by Huffman encoding. This combination is especially effective when the percentage of don't cares in a test set is high, which is a common case in today's large systems-on-chips (SoCs). Our analysis and experimental results confirm that achieving up to an 89% compression ratio and a 93% scan-in power reduction is possible for scan-testable circuits such as ISCAS89 benchmarks.