Scan Chain Reordering-Aware X-Filling and Stitching for Scan Shift Power Reduction

Sungyoul Seo, Yong Lee, Hyeonchan Lim, Joo-Hwan Lee, Hongbom Yoo, Yojoung Kim, Sungho Kang · 2015

As a scan-based testing enables higher test coverage and faster test time than alternative ways, it is widely used by most system-on-chip (SoC) designers. However, since the number of logic gates is over one hundred million gates, a number of scan cells lead to excessive power consumption and it produces a low shifting frequency during the scan shifting mode. In this paper, we present a new scan shift power reduction method based on a scan chain reordering (SR)-aware X-filling and a stitching method. There is no need to require an additional logic for reducing the scan shift power, just a little routing overhead. Experimental results show that this method improves scan shift power consumption on benchmark circuits in most cases compared to the results of the previous works.

Read the paper · More papers on PaperTik