• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.74-78
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• 2006

This paper presents a high-speed pulse-based flip-flop with pseudo MUX-type scan compatible with the conventional master-slave flip-flop with MUX-type scan. The proposed flip-flop was implemented as the standard cell library using Samsung 130nm HS technology. The data-to-output delay and power-delay-product of the proposed flip-flop are reduced by up to 59% and 49%, respectively. By using this flop-flop, ARM11 softcore has achieved the maximum 1GHz operating speed.

• The Transactions of the Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers A
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• v.48 no.9
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• pp.1161-1166
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• 1999

Delay testing has become highlighted in the field of digital circuits as the speed and the density of the circuits improve greatly. However, delay faults in sequential circuits cannot be detected easily due to the existence of state registers. To overcome this difficulty a new scan filp-flop is devised which can be used for both stuck-at testing and delay testing. In addition, the new scan flip-flop can be applied to both the existing functional justification method and the newly-developed reverse functional justification method which uses scan flip-flops as storing the second test patterns rather than the first test patterns. Experimental results on ISCAS 89 benchmark circuits show that the number of testable paths can be increased by about 10% on the average.

• Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology
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• v.4 no.4
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• pp.559-565
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• 2009

Power dissipation during scan testing is becoming an important concern as design sizes and gate densities increase. The high switching activity of combinational circuits is an unnecessary operation in scan shift mode. In this paper, we present a novel architecture to reduce test power dissipation in combinational logic by blocking signal transitions at the logic inputs during scan shifting. We propose a unique architecture that uses dmuxed scan flip-flop (DSF) and transmission gate as an alternative to muxed scan flip-flop. The proposed method does not have problems with auto test pattern generation (ATPG) techniques such as test application time and computational complexity. Moreover, our elegant method improves performance degradation and large overhead in terms of area with blocking logic techniques. Experimental results on ITC99 benchmarks show that the proposed architecture can achieve an average improvement of 30.31% in switching activity compared to conventional scan methods. Additionally, the results of simulation with DSF indicate that the powerdelay product (PDP) and area overhead are improved by 28.9% and 15.6%, respectively, compared to existing blocking logic method.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.38 no.3
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• pp.479-486
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• 2016

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.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.187-194
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• 2003

Delay testing has become an area of focus in the field of digital circuits as the speed and density of circuits have greatly improved. This paper proposes a new scan flip-flop and test algorithm to overcome some of the problems in delay testing. In the proposed test algorithm, the second test pattern is generated by scan justification, and the first test pattern is processed by functional justification. In the conventional functional justification, it is hard to generate the proper second test pattern because it uses a combinational circuit for the pattern. The proposed scan justification has the advantage of easily generating the second test pattern by direct justification from the scan. To implement our scheme, we devised a new scan in which the slave latch is bypassed by an additional latch to allow the slave to hold its state while a new pattern is scanned in. Experimental results on ISCAS'89 benchmark circuits show that the number of testable paths can be increased by about 45 % over the conventional functional justification.

• The Transactions of the Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers P
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• v.53 no.4
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• pp.210-215
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• 2004

This paper proposes an implicit method for computing the minimum cost feedback vertex set for a graph. For an arbitrary graph, a Boolean function is derived, whose satisfying assignments directly correspond to feedback vertex sets of the graph. Importantly, cycles in the graph are never explicitly enumerated, but rather, are captured implicitly in this Boolean function. This function is then used to determine the minimum cost feedback vertex set. Even though computing the minimum cost satisfying assignment for a Boolean function remains an NP-hard problem, it is possible to exploit the advances made in the area of Boolean function representation in logic synthesis to tackle this problem efficiently in practice for even reasonably large sized graphs. The algorithm has obvious application in flip-flop selection for partial scan. The algorithm proposed in this paper is the first to obtain the MFVS solutions for many benchmark circuits.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.37 no.11
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• pp.105-114
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• 2000

Delay testing is essential for assurance of digital circuits as the speed and the density of the circuits improve greatly. However, delay faults in sequential circuits cannot be detected easily due to the existence of state registers. To overcome this difficulty a new test method and algorithm are devised which can be used for both stuck-at testing and delay testing. To apply the new test method, a new scan flip-flop is implemented. Experimental results on ISCAS 89 benchmark circuits show that the number of testable paths can be increased drastically over conventional scan techniques.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics C
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• v.35C no.11
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• pp.11-20
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• 1998

Testability analysis computes controllabilities and observabilities of all lines of a circuit and then evaluates fault coverage. The values of controllability and observability as well as fault coverage produced by testability analysis are used for applications of testability analysis. ITEM was evaluated as a fault coverage tool. But the values of controllability and observability at all lines of circuits must be estimated as a performance measure of testability tools for another application such as partial scan. In this paper, partial scan method based on sensitivity analysis which estimates relative improvement of detectability of circuits after scanning a flip-flop is used for performance evaluation of ITEM. Performance of ITEM, with respect to testability values on each net, has been measured by comparing ITEM and STAFAN. Partial scan performance achieved by ITEM is very similar to that of STAFAN, but ITEM takes less CPU time. Therefore ITEM is very efficient for partial scan application because ITEM runs faster for very large circuits in which execution time is critical.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.42 no.2 s.332
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• pp.73-82
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• 2005

Test data volume and power consumption for scan vectors are two major problems in system-on-a-chip testing. Therefore, this paper proposes a new test data compression/decompression method for low power testing. The method is based on analyzing the factors that influence test parameters: compression ratio, power reduction and hardware overhead. To improve the compression ratio and the power reduction ratio, the proposed method is based on Modified Statistical Coding (MSC), Input Reduction (IR) scheme and the algorithms of reordering scan flip-flops and reordering test pattern sequence in a preprocessing step. Unlike previous approaches using the CSR architecture, the proposed method is to compress original test data, not $T_{diff}$, and decompress the compressed test data without the CSR architecture. Therefore, the proposed method leads to better compression ratio with lower hardware overhead and lower power consumption than previous works. An experimental comparison on ISCAS '89 benchmark circuits validates the proposed method.