Physical-Aware Approaches for Speeding Up Scan Shift Operations in SoCs

System-on-chip (SoC) designs have a number of flip-flops; the more flip-flops an SoC has, the longer the associated scan test application time will be. A scan shift operation accounts for a significant portion of a scan test application time. This paper presents physical-aware approaches for speeding up scan shift operations in SoCs. To improve the speed of a scan shift operation, we propose a layout-aware flip-flop insertion and scan shift operation-aware physical implementation procedure. The proposed combined method of insertion and procedure effectively improves the speed of a scan shift operation. Static timing analyses of state-of-the-art SoC designs show that the proposed approaches help increase the speeds of scan shift operations by up to 4.1 times that reached under a conventional method. The faster scan shift operation speeds help to shorten scan test application times, thus reducing test costs.