A test compaction oriented don't care identification method based on X-bit distribution

Abstract

In recent years, the growing density and complexity of VLSIs have led to an increase in the numbers of test patterns and fault models. Test patterns used in VLSI testing are required to provide high quality and low cost. Don't care (X) identification techniques and X-filling techniques are methods to satisfy these requirements. However, conventional X-identification techniques are less effective for application-specific fields such as test compaction because the X-bits concentrate on particular primary inputs and pseudo primary inputs. In this paper, we propose a don't care identification method for test compaction. The experimental results for ITC'99 and ISCAS'89 benchmark circuits show that a given test set can be efficiently compacted by the proposed method. Copyright © 2013 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers.